On Fri, Dec 05, 2003 at 12:01:49PM -0500, Allister MacLeod wrote: > 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: > It is with great trepidation that I enter into this thread, so > warm to the touch, but here goes... LOL ;-) > > > 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. Eh, I'm not much of a fan of sifting through a cat of two DocBook/SGML fragments in w3m. I'd much rather have real HTML that w3m can browse usefully, rather than having to search all over for anything that might be interesting :-( Having said that, I've now retracted my request for CVS docs to be put online, instead concentrating the fight purely on the released versions. > 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. Um, yeah, you can glean your how-the-heck-do-I-use-this-damn-thing docs from the source (and wipe out your almost-done doctoral thesis because you made a slightly wrong assumption while speedreading a straightforward-looking piece of code that could win an IOCCC award for the manner in which something is done (the product of a dev who wanted the code to look like it does what it does, even if it ddoes it in a different way than the "standard" one)), but I'd rather have the dev write me a few pages about how to use the darn thing himself: he knows his own code better than I know his code. > Finally, why don't you have a functioning sgml2txt and/or sgml2html? Simple: I _do_ have an old version of the sgmltools, but Mutt doesn't like it at all. > 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.) Yeah, it's relatively easy to get a new version, etc. - another reason why I'm dropping my request for CVS docs online. - Dave -- Uncle Cosmo, why do they call this a word processor? It's simple, Skyler. You've seen what food processors do to food, right? Please visit this link: http://rotter.net/israel
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