Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 16:25:55 +0000 From: Nik Clayton <nik@nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk> To: current@freebsd.org, doc@freebsd.org Subject: Handbook DocBook cutover complete Message-ID: <19990327162554.K3136@catkin.nothing-going-on.org>
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Almost a year ago I started the project to switch the Handbook over
from LinuxDoc to DocBook.
I've pulled the big shiny lever, and the switch has now happened. This
has meant that some URLs to pages within the Handbook have changed.
Not many, but a few.
For those not following the CVS lists, I've;
* Removed this project as an entry from the Doc. Proj.'s "Current
Projects" list at docproj/current.html
* Checked every reference to the Handbook on the website and FAQ, and
updated them where necessary to point to the new pages.
* Updated the website make(1) infrastructure to use the DocBook Handbook
instead of the LinuxDoc one.
* Updated "make release" so that the DocBook Handbook is built.
Reactivated the "distribute" target in doc/en/handbook/Makefile to
make this happen. Turned off the LinuxDoc Handbook in doc/Makefile.
* Edited doc/handbook/Makefile, so it's now a NOP. "make" in there will
print a polite message and exit.
You should be able to see the effect at roughly 0400 PST. If you can't
wait that long, ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/ *should* contain
gzipped copies of the plain text, postscript, and HTML (split, and non
split) versions.
Assuming the feedback from this is positive I'll "cvs remove" doc/handbook
from the repository in a few days time. I'll lift the Handbook freeze at
the same point.
Advocacy
--------
I haven't (yet) put this on the announces page of the website, because I
want people to beat up on it in the wild for a day or so first.
I'm fairly hopeless at writing press releases, but I think we should shout
about this at least a little bit. If anyone wants to volunteer one, please
do. If not, could someone (anyone) please forward me a sample FreeBSD
press release that I can crib boiler plate from. At the very least I'll
try and get it posted to
* The Davenport (maintainers of DocBook) mailing list
* The SGMLTools mailing list
* www.freebsdrocks.com
* slashdot.org (they probably won't post it, but you never know)
* comp.text.sgml
* DaemonNews
[ Any other suggestions? ]
It's worth mentioning that SGML is the older brother of XML, which is
getting quite a lot of press recently. I don't know whether we can
leverage that in any way.
Known bugs
----------
* I probably haven't caught all the references to old Handbook pages on
the site, so there might be some broken links. But I don't think so.
This will impact on people who've linked to the Handbook from outside
the FreeBSD site though. Sorry 'bout that.
* The non-English Handbook's haven't been converted.
* PDF generation is broken. I've got a fix, but I haven't tested it
yet, and it involves updating a port I don't maintain, so it'll have
to wait a couple of days.
Acknowledgements
----------------
My thanks to John Fieber, the previous Doc. Proj. manager. It's his fault
I started doing this. I remember he thought it would take about 3 hours.
360 days later. . .
Thanks also to James Clark, Norm Walsh, and Sebastian Rahtz. Respectively,
they are resposible for Jade, which processes and formats the SGML source,
the stylesheets which tell Jade how to format the document, and the TeX
macros that allow pretty Postscript output.
Finally, thanks to those other members of the FreeBSD community (particularly
the TeX hackers) who were able to answer my questions when I stumbled in to
areas way outside my sphere of competance.
Right, I'm off to play Populous. . .
--
Bagel: The carbohydrate with the hole
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