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Re: docs (was "Re: How to change From: and other headers according to language")



It is with great trepidation that I enter into this thread, so
warm to the touch, but here goes...

On Fri, Dec 05, 2003 at 10:01:56AM -0500, David Yitzchak Cohen wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 05, 2003 at 09:34:02AM -0500, David T-G wrote:
> > 1) When you failed to find reply-hook in the stable docs on the web site,
> > why didn't you try looking locally at your unstable package?
> My unstable package doesn't have human-readable docs, so I have an easy
> answer to that one ;-)

I humbly beg to differ.  The documentation source code, as far as I
can tell, contains a pair of SGML files (manual.head.sgml and
manual.tail.sgml).  Now, while SGML does indeed contain some markup
which may not be immediately intelligible to the layman, the bulk of
it is still eminently human-readable.

For that matter, the source code is human-readable also.  Even though
program code must be machine-readable and correct for the compiler to
accept it, a large purpose of good programming languages is for humans
to communicate about machine instructions.  Otherwise, we'd all
program our computers with fancy macro assemblers.

Finally, why don't you have a functioning sgml2txt and/or sgml2html?
On my Debian testing system, it was easy enough to 'apt-get install \
linuxdoc-tools'.  There also exists some source code at 
http://www.sgmltools.org/ (maybe the 1.0 series is more likely to
provide sgml2txt.)

Hasta luego,
 Allister

-- 
Allister MacLeod <amacleod@xxxxxxxx> | http://amacleod.is-a-geek.org/
 Elen síla lúmenn'omentielvo.