Transition to Mallard?

[Matthew East]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 4:31 PM, Kyle Nitzsche
<kyle.nitzsche at canonical.com> wrote:
> A significant disadvantage is that only yelp can display Mallard (now)
> and not all customized Ubuntu versions necessarily use Yelp. This means
> that your great doc contributions may not be available in all cases.
> Content format should not dictate the display application or else there
> are significant potential limitations not all of which can be understood
> in advance.

Unless I've missed something, this is not a disadvantage to
transitioning from xml to mallard, because only yelp can display xml
natively too. If a customised Ubuntu version decides not to use yelp,
that's more or less a decision not to use ubuntu-docs in its current
form too (because ubuntu-docs exclusively ships xml). To reuse the
material the absolute minimum you'll need to do is to convert it into
html. And mallard can be converted into html in the same way as
docbook.

On the original proposal, I am attracted by the prospect of doing
something different which is clearly the way to go for the future.
Equally, we could establish some work that Gnome might be able to
build on upstream. It also sounds like Mallard will mean better yelp
performance and presentation.

I'm worried about the packaging and translation toolchain
implications. In particular the packaging, because we will probably
need to figure out a new way to install documents on disk and to
ensure that the upgrade process from our current documents is smooth -
I'm not sure what needs to be done to resolve that. But one way to
resolve these concerns is simply to try in a separate branch, and to
be ready to defer the change to Lucid+1 if it doesn't work out. All we
would lose is that we'd be distracted from writing new documentation.
We would have about 5-6 weeks to sort this out.

Is there a working docbook -> mallard converter? Obviously the change
in approach for linking and so on means that a converter could never
do all the work, but a markup converter would go down pretty well.

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