Docbook Build Toolchain (was Re: Proposal: Create product for each derivative's documentation)

[Matthew East]

Hi Philip,

On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 3:05 PM, Philip Olson <philip at roshambo.org> wrote:
>> If you do know of solid tools that the team could use to improve its
>> toolchain, and have some concrete proposals to put forward that could
>> be evaluated, please put them forward.
>
> We suffered from this problem for awhile and ended up creating a new project
> out of it that only requires a recent version of PHP. Granted it only deals
> with the building aspect but it's great to say only PHP is needed instead of
> various boring tools like automake, openjade, xsltproc, etc. This tool also
> builds CHM and PDF.
>
> One goal is to make it generic enough to work on any DocBook project (and it
> sorta is) but currently it contains PHP.net specific elements. If you're
> interested in such a tool let me know and we'll use Ubuntu as a testbed for
> when we continue work on expanding its use for others, or simply try it out.
> Granted we designed it for DocBook 5 but DocBook 4 should work without too
> much trouble.
>
> The tool in question is called PhD: http://wiki.php.net/doc/phd

That does look quite cool. I think for building HTML in particular we
are likely to be heavily biased in favour of tools which exist in the
Ubuntu main repository, because we build HTML in our package
generation process, which happens in the automatic Ubuntu build
machines in Launchpad. Those machines can only use build tools which
are in the Ubuntu repository. What are the chances of your tool making
it into Ubuntu?

But the barrier to entry that has been mentioned isn't really in the
build process: contributors to the team don't need to know about
those. What we're looking for is an easier way for people to
contribute material to the xml documents, so a wiki->xml tool, or a
robust xml editor...

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF