Re: yelp performance (Re: Successor to DocBook)

[Don Scorgie <DonScorgie Blueyonder co uk>]

Hey,

On Mon, 2006-07-17 at 09:53 +0200, Karl Eichwalder wrote:
> Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> writes:
<snip>
> 
> But not again during the scrollkeeper registration time ;)  "make
> distcheck" is good enough, but developers have to get used to this
> target.

There should be a fundamental rule of GNOME that a package must pass a
make distcheck before it can be considered for distribution.  If
something doesn't pass, it should be considered a bug, a report filed
and an older package used.

> 
> > The problem with installing cooked documents is that
> > the user is stuck with the presentation you went with
> > when you created the HTML (or whatever else you turned
> > it into).
> 
> I don't want you to install HTML files, but only simplified or
> normalized XML files--for example, HTML modeled tables instead of CALS
> tables.
> 
> > (As an aside, I often call Texinfo a great idea, done
> > poorly.  It got a lot of things right, but a number of
> > design decisions (flaws in my book, maybe not others'
> > books) have relegated it to the niche geek tool it is
> > today.  Done differently, I believe Texinfo could have
> > become the single documentation format for everything,
> > including the desktop.)
> 
> During the last year, Karl Berry and friends improved Texinfo in many
> areas, probably too late, to make it an option instead of XML: First of
> all, they added table, image and some i18n/l10n support; then there are
> now more output formats: HTML and 2 XML flavors (Texinfo and DocBook).
> If you are interested in high quality books _now_, Texinfo is still the
> best input format.

... now if only distros / tarballs installed the XML version (heck, even
the HTML version.  Even provided them as an alternative) instead of the
(what I'll call) info version, it would be great.  Currently Yelp has to
pick through the info version, looking for obscure "tags" (like *Note
and *Menu) and parse them properly.  And cope with the random
capitalisation of the tags.  And also deal with tag tables (location of
pages within the file), which are constantly wrong.  And figure out
links that randomly change format and switch between directories between
files (and on occasion within files).

Grrr...  Sorry.
Don