RE: Yet another question

[Gregory Leblanc <GLeblanc@cu-portland.edu>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Luis Villa [mailto:liv@duke.edu]
> Sent: Monday, July 24, 2000 11:27 PM
> To: Cees de Groot
> Cc: ldp-docbook@lists.debian.org; ldp-docbook@lists.linuxdoc.org
> Subject: Re: Yet another question 
> 
> On Tue, 25 Jul 2000, Cees de Groot wrote:
> > liv@duke.edu said:
> > > 3) Why is <Rant> not a DocBook tag? Seriously... I had 
> always assumed
> > > (when I heard that the LDP was switching from LinuxDoc to DocBook)
> > > that that went that DocBook had a well developed set of 
> tools to work
> > > with, just like LinuxDoc.
> > 
> > We've tried at the SGMLtools project, but there was lack of 
> interest to help 
> > out making it better. In the meantime, apparently the 
> net.gods at the LDP 
> > decided to help further yet another toolkit around DocBook 
> (I presume these 
> > are based on Mark Galassi's scripts). Splitting up 
> prematurely doesn't seem to 
> > be an optimal way to get good tools, or to get stylesheet 
> modifications 
> > widespread....

You can get most of the tools that Greg Ferguson is using to convert things
from the LDP CVS.  I think they're in the "builder" module.  Try cvs -d
$CVS_ROOT update LDP/builder.  They're NOT Mark Galassi's scripts.

> > [history: when we wanted to convert from Linuxdoc to 
> DocBook with SGMLtools, I 
> > spent a lot of time looking for existing stuff. Mark's 
> scripts already 
> > existed, but - at least at that time - they were a bunch of 
> quick hacks to get 
> > things going. So we designed a clean Python shell from 
> scratch and repeatedly 
> > invited everyone to join in, tried to persuade the LDP to 
> switch to DocBook, 
> > but I cannot remember ever getting much response. I'm not 
> fingerpointing, 
> > people were probably all too busy, but it surely has been a 
> heck of a missed 
> > change]

The problem that I had with the SGMLtools project was that it wouldn't
compile on any of my work systems.  I managed to make it work on Linux,
once, but never on Solaris, or OpenBSD.  I did mail the list a few times,
but I got stuck and really frustrated, and in the end gave up.  Since Mark's
scripts can't co-exist with the ones that Dave made for the GDP, I've been
thinking about SGMLTools lite.  I'm not sure if I'll wait for a stable
release or not.  I that the problem with getting the LDP to go to DocBook
was with the tools not being as good as the ones for Linuxdoc, and that the
tools couldn't get any better unless somebody was actively using them.  Ah,
to have more hours in a day...
	Grego


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