docbook?
Here's an idea....
What would people think of trying to convert mutt's documentation to
another format -- docbook, maybe -- before a 1.6 release? I'm not
familiar with docbook, but I've heard things about it from collaborators
on other projects that make me think it might be more suitable than
sgml-tools, going forward. I believe it's more portable already, which
would be a big help for me, at least.
One objection is that someone has to translate all the docs. If
converting to another format is ideally desirable, then the sooner, the
better, I say -- the task will only get harder from here. It would be a
big task for one person, but there's a lot of time available across the
whole community, so we could take advantage of that.
I would propose that one person take existing documentation files and do
any translation that can be done by script, producing something roughly
approximating docbook. Then he or she would parcel these files up into
manageable chunks and hand them out to volunteers. The volunteers
could then send their parcels to a second-stage proofreader, who would
pass them back to the first person to be reassembled. This way it
doesn't become an overwhelming task for one or two people, but something
achievable by distributed means.
That first person would need to be familiar with docbook, though. :)
This is similar to the strategy used at pgdp.net, where thousands of
volunteers prepare electronic texts on a scale that single volunteers
(per book) could not.
--
-D. dgc@xxxxxxxxxxxx NSIT University of Chicago