Re: Rep:Re: Permission to submit HOWTO

[Gary Preckshot <garrell@inreach.com>]

 pac1@tiac.net wrote:
> 
>  (How's the view up there Gary?)

Lonely, as always. But I'm used to it.


> 
> Trouble is that the information you're putting in the resulting
> documents is also needed in other input formats.  Not just additional
> output formats.

That was the problem that Goldfarb eventually solved,
although he wasn't so ambitious at first.

> I hope you can start discussing ideas about the structure
> of information pertaining to Linux instead of getting into extended
> discussion of why any one familiar or favorite tool can be used to do
> "everything", without ever defining what the "everything" is.

Good point! I made the mistake of slurring their favorite
editor, and a lot of them can't get past that.

> 
> Many are busy developing and deploying as Docbook documents.  While they
> do so, they are devloping a resource of information.  This resource is
> recorded as a docbook file.  We need to examine new uses for the
> information, asking how best to represent this information so it can be
> effecively used.  Docbook may not be the whole answer, or if Docbook can
> be refined and extended without making it so complicated that docbook
> itself becomes unusable, maybe it is.  The answer may be DocBook and
> something else yet to be invented.  Either way we should not care too
> much about any one tool.

Actually DocBook has features yet unplumbed. A lot of them.
If you read DB:TDG, you can see Walsh's intentions. DocBook
is actually a far more general tool than any usage LDP is
making of it. It's really designed for large accumulations
of papers or other written documents. I suspect that
organizations like the APS or IEEE, with large databases of
technical journals, are going to go to a DTD like DocBook.

> 
> In any case, Docbook and SGML are where linux documentation is today.
> That's ok.  The work being done using these tools is valuable.  I use
> the results regularly and I thank you for it.  Now let's move on and
> define the future.
> 

Right! If LDP uses it right, conversion to a later format
will be easy. A matter of putting a fast computer with big
disks to work.

It's really a database design problem. Just like any
database, if the data are there, you can find them or
transfer them to another form.

Gary


--  
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to ldp-discuss-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org