Re: knowledge base/docs site?

["Jens Bech Madsen" <jbm oncable dk>]

Gene Heskett <gene_heskett iolinc net> wrote:
> On Thursday 02 January 2003 02:40, Michael Hunt wrote:

> >Pat. Jeff explained why he wanted to use doc book when he replied
> > to the original post on wiki :-
> >
> >'Thanks, but no, not a Wiki. I've said many times that
> >Docbook documentation will be gratefully accepted (as it's 
> >easy to work with, easy to add to, easy to maintain, etc).'
> 
> And to which I replied negatively as its not a universally accepted 
> format, at least not to red hat users.  Then this post actually 
> tries to give some usefull information, thank you Michael.
> 

<some stuff about non-working browsers or links snipped>

> I repeat, if I can't use it like a manpage, of what earthly
> use is it? 

There seems to be a difference in terms of what kind of documentation is needed. I wouldn't expect information about installing and trouble-shoooting to be represented as a man-page (this is the kind of information I think Jeff is talking about and the kind of information I think is needed). I would expect it as either a plain-text file or published on the web, just as is the case now. Docbook (well, any SGML format really) is not about displaying data, it is about marking data, so transformation into a variety of formats is easy. In the case of Docbook there already exists lots of stylesheets for transforming Docbook documents into a lot of standard (display-)formats such as troff (man pages), texi (info pages) and HTML.

I think SGML is the right solution and Docbook _is_ easy to use. You can mail me with information which you think should be added to the existing stuff on Jeff's Garnome site and I will format it in Docbook and send it to Jeff.


Cheers,
Jens

PS. Sorry for the poor formatting, webmail blows :-(