Re: Online doc generator

On Apr 12, 2004, at 11:37 AM, Bertrand Mansion wrote:

<mike@php.net> wrote :

Bertrand Mansion wrote:

That's for sure, it looks like people using docbook think they are clever guys. Actually, docbook is not only XML as you tend to think it is. It is also difficult to install because not very compatible, it takes a lot of disk space, it doesn't install in standard places and the version used by PEARDOC is custom and incomplete, so it is difficult to find. I spent 2 days trying to get this to work, I won't waste more time on it.

Well Bertrand, that sounds like a lame excuse to me. AFAIR installing [open]jade, sgml-tools and docbook-dsssl on debian took me about 30 seconds - not that I'd have done anything more special than apt-get install.

Cool, if docbook works fine on Debian, well, I just have to buy a new computer and throw my Powerbook away... Never ! :)

You can build it easily on Mac OSX installing fink ( http://fink.sourceforge.net/) After you install fink apt-get openjade apt-get libxml apt-get xsltproc and it works fine.

IMO, we wouldn't be so lazy if we had to correct tools to write the doc. Once you have written the code, you want people to use it, then you write documentation. I even know people who start to write the doc before the code is ready ! If you know that writing the doc is going to take you forever, you bypass this step. This reminds me that credits for the documentation on the first page go to : Daniel Convissor David Costa Thomas V.V. Cox Martin Jansen Alan Knowles Alexander Merz Jon Parise Stephan Schmidt Mika Tuupola Michael Wallner Still I wrote Config docs and Alexey and I both wrote QuickForm docs. Plus the different QF renderer developers wrote docs for their renderers. So it seems this list of authors is not dynamic.

Is not dynamic but, frankly I think that the credits are not a big issue. ;)