Re: Documentation questions

[Rob Savoye]

On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 03:17:40PM -0400, Ben Elliston wrote:
 
> Surely this is just a matter of consistency?  Almost all packages in
> the GNU Project use Texinfo.

  Actually, while this used to be true, more and more projects are either
switching to SGML, or starting with it for new projects. While most of the
older GNU packages do use texinfo, many of the newer ones don't. eCOS used
SGML, which was my first introduction to it. Cygnus even helped develop
some of the Docbook tools we used for that project.

  Back in the beginning, DejaGnu had a TROFF format doc & manpage. Then
I rewrote it in texinfo, and now SGML. It's always been worth the
incremental improvements in documentation tools. With the Docbook Tools
being in most Linux distributions these days, it's not that hard to use SGML.
And the multiple format output is way better.

  Now that I've found some good tools to make texi output from a Docbook
file, I'll probably use that to generate texi, and then info. As I already
include the docs in ps, rtf, pdf, and html, I might as well add info to the
list. Probably not for this release though.

        - rob -