ANNOUNCE new DocBook tools packages released

[Mark Galassi <rosalia@lanl.gov>]

        ANNOUNCE: the DocBook tools packages, 1999-08-24
        ================================================

Dear DocBook enthusiasts,

A new release of the DocBook tools is available.

These tools are now being maintained on the Cygnus sourceare site:
    http://sourceware.cygnus.com/docbook-tools/
thank you to Cygnus for hosting this and many other projects on 
sourceware.

The RPM packages can be found at

    ftp://sourceware.cygnus.com/pub/docbook-tools/docware/

My DocBook intro is at:

     http://nis-www.lanl.gov/~rosalia/mydocs/docbook-intro.html

------------ some of the changes ------------

* Ultra-sparc RPMs are still there, but they are older.  I'm not using
  those right now, and I don't have an ultra-sparc platform to build
  them on.  I'd be curious to see if anyone has good results with that.

* Tracking the latest version of all the component tools (jade,
  stylesheets, PSGML...)

* New DocBook 3.1 DTD!!  Note that the old one is also still
  installed, and both can be used simultaneously.  So you can gently
  migrate your documents form
  <!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//Davenport//DTD DocBook V3.0//EN">
  to
  <!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook V3.1//EN">

* RPMs are now generated on Red Hat 6.0.  The old ones are still squirreled
  away on the ftp for Red Hat 5.2 users, and the SRPMs can probably
  be used too.

------------ project status ------------

DocBook is now ubiquitous in the free software world, and the
maintainers of sgml-tools, FreeBSD documentation project and the
Debian DocBook packages are all doing a much more energetic job than I
am.

So why do we continue with the docbook-tools packaging?  I can give of
a few reasons without thinking hard:

1. Strangely, these packages are still by far the easiest to install
   on a Red Hat system, so people need it.  This is probably because
   I'm less ambitious (the others deal with the old LinuxDoc format
   and so forth...), but that creates an important niche.

2. I actually enjoy working on it when I make the time, and I have
   lots of nice things I want to do with it :-)

3. I forget what point #3 was...  I'm sure it was good!


intro to docbook
----------------
   My tutorial at
     http://nis-www.lanl.gov/~rosalia/mydocs/docbook-intro.html
   is getting a lot of coverage, so I will continue to maintain that
   document.  I'm priming up for some major additions.


------------ Yours truly, --------------

Mark Galassi
rosalia@lanl.gov
http://nis-www.lanl.gov/~rosalia/


------- Here is the INSTALL file -------

Prerequisites
-------------

To use jadetex (to get printed output with TeX) you will need to
install teTeX 0.9 (or newer).  RedHat 4.x, 5.0 and 5.1 come with teTeX
0.4 which cannot handle jadetex.  On newer versions of Red Hat Linux
(5.2 and 6.0) you are fine.

You can get teTeX 0.9 from the RedHat 5.2 distribution and install it
on older RedHat releases.  You will need tetex and tetex-latex, and
you will probably also want tetex-dvips and tetex-xdvi.

Here are ftp URLs for the various teTeX packages:
 
   ftp://rawhide.redhat.com:/i386/RedHat/RPMS/tetex-0.9-6.i386.rpm
   ftp://rawhide.redhat.com:/i386/RedHat/RPMS/tetex-afm-0.9-6.i386.rpm
   ftp://rawhide.redhat.com:/i386/RedHat/RPMS/tetex-doc-0.9-6.i386.rpm
   ftp://rawhide.redhat.com:/i386/RedHat/RPMS/tetex-dvilj-0.9-6.i386.rpm
   ftp://rawhide.redhat.com:/i386/RedHat/RPMS/tetex-dvips-0.9-6.i386.rpm
   ftp://rawhide.redhat.com:/i386/RedHat/RPMS/tetex-latex-0.9-6.i386.rpm
   ftp://rawhide.redhat.com:/i386/RedHat/RPMS/tetex-xdvi-0.9-6.i386.
   ftp://rawhide.redhat.com:/SRPMS/tetex-0.9-6.src.rpm

Sometimes Red Hat will come with SgmlTools 1.something installed,
which has a couple of conflicts (nsgmls and possibly jade).  In this
case you can "rpm -e sgml-tools" to remove it, or if you want to keep
it you can use some RPM magic commands to run the "rpm --upgrade" with
flags that are lenient toward files shared with another package.


Installing
----------

It used to be that you had to install the RPMs in a specific order.
That is no longer necessary: you can grab all the packages

    sgml-common
    docbook
    jade
    jadetex
    psgml
    stylesheets

put them in one directory, and type
    rpm --upgrade *.rpm