Re: Issues cooperation

[Alan Cox <alan lxorguk ukuu org uk>]

On Fri, 2002-11-29 at 16:49, Jody Goldberg wrote:
> > Using Docbook as a standard instead of Texinfo is one example of
> > divergence on standards.
> > --I found out only by accident.
> The decision to use docbook was made in GNOME's distant past,
> easily 3+ years ago.  It predates me so I can't comment on why.
> However, given the vast amount of traffic over the years as every
> project in GNOME has worked to develop their docs it is surprising

DocBook is used by a huge number of projects. Its far better than
texinfo for a large number of tasks and xml docbook is also very clean
and easy for generic xml, xslt and other standards based processing.

The FSF used texinfo instead of man because man although the clear
standard was insufficient. The GNOME, FreeBSD, Linux and other
communities used DocBook because as time has moved on texinfo has
likewise become an incomplete format. Since DocBook is a standard beyond
just the free software community this move is a good thing. The FSF
should probably look at moving forward in this way itself.

In the mean time gnome includes tools that can read info files.