On Wednesday, 27 July 2005 at 10:44, David Champion wrote: > 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. What a funny coincidence. I was just proposing the same thing over IRC yesterday (also because of portability - I have docbook but not linuxdoc on my mac). I think whether or not it should happen before 1.6 really depends on when 1.6 is coming out though. There are probably going to be bugs in the build system as well as proofreading issues. > 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. Only a minor point, but it probably won't get that much harder that fast. Mutt's docs have been pretty static. > 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. :) A lot of this can probably be done simply by running sgmltools -b lb2db on the sgml files. Then the proofreading and hand tuning kicks in. The other task is to rewrite makedoc to produce docbook output. This is also probably pretty straightforward, but it does require learning docbook first. I learned enough to be dangerous a while ago, but have since forgotten it all...
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