Re: [HACKERS] Uppercase SGML entity declarations

On 4/4/11, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 2:50 PM, Christopher Browne <cbbrowne(at)gmail(dot)com>
> wrote:
>> On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 1:26 PM, Susanne Ebrecht <susanne(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>
>> wrote:
>>> Anyway, I figured out there is another argument for XML:
>>>
>>> My information is that DocBook 5.0 won't support SGML anymore.
>>>
>>> Which means - sooner or later a reaction is needed.
>>
>> Yes, indeed.
>>
>> I don't think that during the 9.1 alpha phase is the right time to
>> think about this, but this certainly seems appropriate to consider as
>> a 9.2 "ToDo" item.
>>
>> There are arguments as to why to switch to version 5, which is,
>> indeed, XML-only.
>> http://www.docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/ch01.html#introduction-why-to-switch
>
> AFAICT, the biggest problem with our existing toolchain is that it's
> hard for some people to get it working. In theory, we have
> documentation that explains this:
>
> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/docguide-toolsets.html
>
> However, in contrast to the vast majority of our documentation, it stinks.
>

I've certainly wasted non-trivial amounts of time trying to get it to
work on some platforms. I'd be *very* glad to see us using a
simplified toolchain if possible.

Another point to note is that whilst it will still be possible to
install older versions of docbook for a while, presumably that'll
become more and more of a pain, as distros update to 5.x, requiring
users to start building manually, and having to deal with parallel
installations of two versions.

--
Dave Page
Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

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