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Date:      Thu, 2 Dec 2004 21:49:48 +0100
From:      Marc Fonvieille <blackend@FreeBSD.org>
To:        "Simon L. Nielsen" <simon@FreeBSD.org>
Cc:        freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: Doc BoF at EuroBSDCon
Message-ID:  <20041202204948.GC78684@abigail.blackend.org>
In-Reply-To: <20041202195739.GK753@zaphod.nitro.dk>
References:  <20041128202656.GL750@zaphod.nitro.dk> <20041128211444.GC6664@abigail.blackend.org> <20041202195739.GK753@zaphod.nitro.dk>

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On Thu, Dec 02, 2004 at 08:57:39PM +0100, Simon L. Nielsen wrote:
> >=20
> > Why?  Why a move to XML?
>=20
> The main reason would be that a lot of new tools work with XML.  We
> already use some e.g. for the mirror section, and having the DocBook
> as real XML should make it less painful to add more like that.  Also,
> rumor has it that the XML based DocBook tools is a lot faster.
>=20
> Also it's really nice to be able to do preprocessing using XSLT, which
> is, while not perfect, far less painful that DSSSSSSL/Scheme.
>

You're right, DSSSL is not easy to deal with, I don't know if a XSLT
solution can replace our DSSSL system.

> > > - Handling multiple FreeBSD release branches (4.X/5.X/6.X) in Handbook
> > >   to get rid of notes about "For 4.X do....".  There should be
> > >   multiple build Handbook versions on website, and perhaps one
> > >   complete one with "This section is for 4.X only..." and so on
> > >   automatically added.
> > >=20
> > [...]
> >=20
> > It's true that when a new major version appears there are problems of
> > multiple syntaxes, procedures for the same thing, etc.
> > This multiple branches scheme seems to be really difficult to manage
> > especially for persons who write the docs, I can't imagine the pain of
> > having to deal with 3 versions of the same document because the reality
> > is not so simple: a text cannot be simply divided in 3 versions or
> > divided in a general overview part then in major version parts.
>=20
> Well, I don't know how many places it would apply, but what I was
> thinking of was doing someting like this :
>=20
> 	<para>To restart sshd run:</para>
>=20
> 	<screen rel=3D"4">kill -HUP `cat /var/run/sshd.pid`</screen>
>=20
> 	<screen rel=3D">4">/etc/rc.d/sshd reload</screen>
>=20
> Or something like that.  When we don't want to support a release more
> it should be trivial to remove stuff for an old branch.
>=20
[...]

I just had a look to 2 recent/rewritten sections that I know a bit
(the sound card one and the scanner one), and I ended to this opinion:
it's possible to do "release versions" without pain when text is written
in a clean way (by "clean" I mean in thinking about branches version).
For example with the scanner section, it's really easy cause I tried to
write it in separating the specific release version informations.
With the sound card section we will end up to quite 2 differents sections.
So most of time it should be easy to do release versions of docs.
I think we will also need to be able to specify the release version for
some inline element like filename etc.

Marc

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