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Re: RFC: KFAIL DejaGnu patch
On Mon, Apr 08, 2002 at 07:34:25PM -0400, Andrew Cagney wrote:
> Why? Is there a posting somewhere explaining the rationale for this?
I'll have to look around. Mark Gallassi at that time had alot of good
info on this, as he was Cygnus's DocTools maintainer. (btw, the page on
sourceware is way out of date) Briefly though, the main reasons we chose
it for eCOS, and the Linux Doc project choose it is Docbook is an
international used standard for technical documentation. Framemaker
suports it, CISCO, and many other companies use it for technical
documentation. At the time several years ago when I rewrote the manual,
using SGML gave me much better HTML, PDF, PS, RTF, and dvi output. As the
DocBook SGML tools are included in most modern Linux releases (RedHat, 7.x,
etc...), they are now an accepted format for free software project
documentation. I commonly come across free software projects with Docbook
format manuals.
> None of the ones that I'm interested in - gcc, binutils, gdb - do. It
> is a shame that DejaGnu does as that is the only other tool I really
> depend on.
Well, these tools have been around for quite a while, and already have
reasonably complete manuals. Luckily most people rarely ever had anything
to the DejaGnu manual, so I don't think it's a big problem. Adding a few
paragraphs here and there is just a cut and paste job anyway, whether texinfo
or docbook is used.
At this point though, I have no interest in porting the manual *again* to
switch to texinfo. Too much work, for too little gain.
- rob -