Re: db* does it serve the purpose

[Jorge Godoy <godoy at conectiva dot com dot br>]

On Sat, Feb 26, 2000 at 11:55:59AM +0530, madhu wrote:
> hi
> for the last couple of day's there is healthy discussion going on this list
> well here's is my $2 bit 
> a) as a user should i be worrying about tweaking the scripts whether be
> it db2html or dbk or David's dbnochunk or for that matter forthcoming eric's Db
>  and not to forget howto to install Norman's stylesheets and also the
> forthcoming Docbook DTD's . whew that is one hell of a list 

That's what we are concerned too.

> b) The irony of it all is this is regarding  tools which is supposed to make 
> our documents better and easier to maintain  

Documents maintenance is a separate philosophy. I agree that having an
easy way to use them is one of the things that we must look at. 

> c) as i see it all these tools must have its origin in the fact the authors
> would have resorted to it only to ease their pain but not neccessarily useful
> to others 
>  also the surprising thing why none of the distro's have looked at it from
> user space .What i want is something is like this

No "distro" has looked at it from user space because it's something
new. I thinks it's borning now, since the use of SGMLtools "died" when
the project was abandoned. Now it has a new maintainer. 

> i enter at  prompt
> $ Db everybody
> and it asks me 
> $TARGET
> and i enter 
> $  *.sgm/sgml or *.xml
> and it asks
> $ FORMAT
> I enter 
> $HTML OR PDF or whatever supported output format
> it asks
> $STYLESHEETS
> I enter 
> $path to normans stylesheets (this eliminates the hassle of installing
> questions ;-) and also probably this CATALOG business)

CATALOGs exists so that you don't need this step. ;-) The tools are
clever enough to use the right stylesheet. 

> it asks 
> $CONVERTER (this should end jade vs openjade )
> i enter 
> $ jade or openjade
> it says 
> $ CHUNK/NOCHUNK
> i say 
> $ what is appropriate to me
> it says 
> $ Please wait .............
> bingo 
> $error  ;-) or i get my out put 
> this should relieve a lot of people of headaches 

But it asks too many questions. We'd also to have GNU syntax:

$ DB --format=html --converter=openjade --nochunk everybody.sgml

It's very interesting for automating conversions. You "*.sgml" would
become:

for i in *.sgml do
    DB --format=html --converter=openjade --nochunk $i
done


> is it wishful thinking or people have valid reason not getting  this done .i
> mean this will as a user who is interested in furthering use of SGML/XML in
> varous application  and spend more quality time with DTD's and styesheets  and
> improving them ,shuoldn,t i stop worrying about what scripts .isnt this the same
> concern of david when he was talking about one more DB unmaintained or i
> misunderstood him . can somebody enlighten me on this 

You got the point. People are, now, concerned with the DTD: it's
resources and it's stylesheets presentation. When it's "beautiful" and
with enough features them they'll look at the way people are
working. We are doing what we can with what we know: I'm not a DTD
hacker, so I'm hacking a way to easy the use of the DTD. 


--
Godoy.	<godoy@conectiva.com.br> 

Setor de Publicações
Publishing Department                   Conectiva S.A.