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Re: RFC: KFAIL DejaGnu patch


On Tue, Apr 09, 2002 at 10:51:32AM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 8 Apr 2002, Andrew Cagney  wrote:
> 
> > > Yes. DocBook is way better than Texinfo at representing technical documents,
> > > than texinfo. Texinfo is great for glorified man pages, but SGML is better
> > > for technical manuals.
> > 
> > Why?  Is there a posting somewhere explaining the rationale for this?
> > 
> >  > While most older GNU projects use texinfo, I see that
> > > many newer GNU/Linux projects use DocBook.
> > 
> > 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.
> 
> I have to agree with Andrew here.  Texinfo is good enough for what we 
> need, especially with the new features introduced in the latest release 
> 4.2, which also supports XML and DocBook output (in addition to HTML, 
> Info, and plain text).
> 
> On top of that, since Texinfo is the GNU standard documentation system,
> a GNU package, especially an important GNU package such as GDB, should be 
> honest and use the GNU tools for its documentation.  Otherwise the GNU 
> project could be rightfully accused of hypocrisy.

"Good enough for what we need" seems like an awfully bad reason to
disagree with another developer's choice of documentation formats.  Has
either of you ever looked at DocBook source?  If not, I recommend
casually browsing some - the DejaGNU manual perhaps:

http://savannah.gnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/*checkout*/dejagnu/dejagnu/doc/overview.sgml?rev=1.6&content-type=text/plain

It is drastically simpler than Texinfo, easy to learn, easy to modify,
and only a little harder to write from scratch.


And where did GDB using anything but Texinfo come in to this
conversation?  We're talking about the DejaGNU documentation!

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz                           Carnegie Mellon University
MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer


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