Re: gnome-doc-tools

[Rainer Wichmann <st8h304 hs uni-hamburg de>]

There is more than just Linux, and you can't realistically expect every 
Unix/BSD/Linux/(insert any other fancy OS) vendor/distributor
to follow the LSB. The problem with DocBook, as I perceive it, is:
if you want to provide provide a third-party extension (like the GNOME DTD
and style file), you need to kmow where to "hook in". 
And while I figured out how to install the gnome-doc-tools, I finally
realized that probably the only generic way to find the proper "hook" is
by scrutinizing the db2html shell script - that's fine for me, as long as
someone would tell me so in advance, but I don't think that forcing people
to do something like:
   touch dummy.sgml
   /bin/sh -x db2html 2>&1 dummy.sgml | grep "+ jade"
is a particularly elegant way to provide crucial information ... let
alone that you first need to understand the design of DocBook to some extent
to know how to make use of the output of that command to install
the gnome-doc-tools. 

rainer

 
On Fri, 8 Jun 2001, Dan Mueth wrote:

> 
> Hi Rainer,
> 
> I'm sorry to hear this was so much work.  I'm sure the learning experience
> may be valuable though.  I think things will be simpler in the future as
> more Linux distributions adopt the new LSB specifications for SGML on
> Linux.  It sounds like SuSE 6.4 does not use the newer specifications.
> 
> This article may be of interest to others on gnome-doc-list.  If you are
> not on this mailing list, you can also reach it by mailing to
> docs gnome org 
> 
> 
> Dan
> 
> 
> On Fri, 8 Jun 2001, Rainer Wichmann wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> >
> > last Monday I wanted to install the gnome-doc-tools on my SuSE 6.4 Linux
> > box. It took me a whole afternoon to figure out how to install the DTD and
> > the style file, and I learned quite a bit about the overall design
> > of DocBook (and its severe design flaws when it comes to installing
> > third-party extensions) while I was stumbling from one problem into the
> > next ...
> >
> > so when I finally succeeded, I wrote a small article about it, including,
> > but not limited to a step-by-step _generic_ (i.e. Redhat-independent)
> > installation guide.
> >
> > If you are interested:
> > online HTML: http://www.la-samhna.de/library/GnomeDoc/index.html
> > SGML source: http://www.la-samhna.de/library/GnomeDoc/GnomeDoc.sgml
> >
> > Regards,
> >   rainer
> >
> >
> 
>