DocBook <-> TeXinfo and the LinuxDOC team

[Mark Galassi <rosalia cygnus com>]

[background for Cees: there has been a ton of activity on the GNOME
list in the last 3 days, with Maciej taking 10 minutes ( :-) I'll bet
it was actually a couple of hours) to write a documentation extractor
for Guile docstrings, which generates DocBook out of them, and Jim
Pick taking a few minutes to hack Norm's DSSSLs to generate TeXinfo
out of them.  Now there's talk about creating a mailing list for
DocBook <-> TeXinfo translation.  Here's my latest reply.]

----------

Dudes,

I think we should contact Cees de Groot about this.  He and the
LinuxDoc people have taken the DocBook RPM suite and put a lot of
energy into perfecting them.  To the point where you now have to "rpm
-e sgml-tools" before you can install my tools on a RedHat 5.1 system!
:-)

It is one of my frustrations and shortcomings that I have not made
enough time to follow their effort more.

I would eventually like to make sure that they have all that is needed
for Cygnus and for GNOME, and leave it up to them for the future,
since I think Cees is much more energetic than I am right now.

Let us set up the list for discussion of DocBook <-> TeXinfo so that
we don't drown the GNOME list, but let us all keep an eye on what Cees 
and co. are doing, and try to make sure that our efforts converge.

PS: the historical note for non-LinuxDoc people is that the Linux
documentation project used to use a latex-like DTD called LinuxDoc,
but they are quickly moving to DocBook.