I have one thing to say on this subject, and that is portability, not between platforms, but between devices. Specifically PDAs and such. The CHM format works on all the new winCE machines (ipaqs for example), I believe. For that reason alone I don't think you should obsolete the CHM manual... perhaps make a function reference only CHM, so theres less to generate?
Really? Do anybody used the CHM on WinCE? I have not heard about it.
I like the idea, I just think that you shouldn't concentrate on obsoleteing the CHM so much as offering a viable alternative for other platforms and for people who don't want the CHM. Or... perhaps you could obsolete the CHM that is generated for php.net and simply link to the extended CHM created by a third party (sorry, I can't remember who you are!)
I am the coordinator of that extended CHM ;) I quite lost the focus on that format, after I have switched to Linux :) So if that needs regular updates, some new maintainer is needed for it. I am not sure whether I will produce any updates for that.
Also, you might think about using XML as the docs format because transformation from XML -> (X)HTML is possible using client-side XSLT in Mozilla (though theres a JS bug before 1.2.x) and IE6 (and for the most part IE5.5, that support the working draft at its time of publication, little changed from that to the final recomendation).
Brrr. I thought about XML distribution becuase it's smaller then the HTML source and it would enbale us to generate PDF on the long run. But I don't think we should depend on Mozilla/MSIE rendering the XML. We would better render it with PHP (which would be needed for searching anyway).
could CVS be used to keep the manual itself up-to-date? Rather than releasing a PEAR package for every major (or minor?) change to the docs themselves... rather just release packages for changes in the scripts, and not the docs.
Well, I don't think that the Docbook XML format is OK for client side parsing. It would simply mean a real huge XML document to parse. Also it would not be easy to implement conditional updates (ie. only update the pages the user often visits). So IMHO a custom update solution will be needed. Especially if we count in that this way third party manuals would also be supported well, who don't have CVS modules.
On a side note, this might make the adoption of PEAR go up too, which is a good thing!
This is one reason I thought about using PEAR. And because it has some packages we can use (ie. HTML_TreeMenu for the CHM like TOC treemenu).
Goba