ANNOUNCE: new DocBook RPMs available

[Mark Galassi <rosalia cygnus com>]

[note for GNOME types: I have saved the messages about topic file
generation and will be studying the issue soon]

        ANNOUNCE: the Cygnus DocBook packages, 1998-04-13

Dear DocBook enthusiasts,

I have placed the latest DocBook packages on the Cygnus anonymous ftp
server:

    ftp://ftp.cygnus.com/pub/home/rosalia/doctools/

The major improvement is in the stylesheets.  I am now tracking Norman
Walsh's "modular stylesheets" closely, and I have included several
fixes and improvements which Norman is now merging in to his own
master copy.

------------ the future ------------

Since we started maintaining these RPMs a lot of things have happened,
but some still need to happen.  Here are some issues I would like
people to know about or think about.

stylesheets
-----------
   Norman Walsh is really cooking on maintaining the modular
   stylesheets.  That is good, since all I have to is track those and
   package them up.

jade
----
   James Clark is very actively developing jade.  Unfortunately jade
   does not build in a GNU-like way, so I will have to do a bit more
   work to track that (I'm slightly behind on jade revisions).

popularity
----------
   The LinuxDoc project has decided to migrate from the linuxdoc DTD
   to DocBook.  This means that there will be a ton of momentum behind
   DocBook.  The latest release of the SGMLtools (I hate the name) is
   actually based on the material I have collected here.  I hope that
   if they keep it up, I can turn over the maintaince to them :-),
   but for now I will still continue putting these RPMs out.

intro to docbook
----------------
   My tutorial at
     http://nis-www.lanl.gov/~rosalia/mydocs/docbook-intro.html
   is getting a lot of coverage, so I will continue to maintain that
   document.

jadetex
-------
   jadetex is the weak link in the free toolchain, and the developer
   seems to be very busy.  I don't know of any progress being made
   here.  I strongly hope that someone picks it up, since until then
   we are forced to use FrameMaker+SGML to generate printed output.


------------ which packages ------------

The important packages you should get are

  sgml-common
  docbook
  jade
  jadetex
  psgml
  stylesheets

There used to be a package called sgml-demo, but since I have not yet
updated it, and it is misleading, I am leaving it out for now.