On Sat, 2004-09-18 at 19:06, Karsten Wade wrote: > On Sat, 2004-09-18 at 05:24, Dave Pawson wrote: > > > What rationale is there for remaining with the SGML toolchain? > > Ironically, the same reason that businesses worldwide stick with > old-but-working systems, where working == we hacked it to work well > enough to ship. > > For the time to produce Enterprise Linux 4, we didn't have enough cycles > to do the R&D ourselves and start writing our guides for the next > release. There are significant cross-team constraints, such as having > percentages of guides string and code frozen for the translation team to > work on. I gather you're speaking for rhel Karsten? I'm asking about fc2,3. > > Frankly, it was pretty daunting to imagine doing the XML toolchain all > ourselves. It was done for you, open src, 5 years ago. > At the time that we had to choose go/no-go on switching to > XML, there were too many problems in the community tools (xmlto PDF > conversion being a big one, iirc), so we had to stick with SGML. Once > we started working in SGML for the production release, we had to stick > with it all the way through until release. I made those decisions in 99. Why has it taken so long for rh to review them? Are they really so 'big blue bound'? > > That means I'm writing 100% in XML, as soon as I take the few hours to > convert my existing work from SGML. :-) Take a look at James Clarks sx. It works. The XML docbook toolchain started in 98. I see no call for pdf in fc2? So fop shouldn't be a blocker, though its probably more than good enough for our use should pdf be wanted. -- Regards DaveP. XSLT&Docbook FAQ http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl
