yodl discontinued.

yodl discontinued.

[Felix Rosencrantz]

It looks like yodl, the tool used to build the zsh docs, has been discontinued
for some time.   Sources can still be found through Debian.  Partly because zsh
is one of a few packages using yodl.

The yodl home page suggests using texinfo.  It's not clear to me why we use
yodl over texinfo.  I'm guessing texinfo doesn't create man pages, but yodl can
create texinfo and man pages.

Though the yodl requirement is sort of a nuisance of the zsh build.  I build
from CVS.  Do we package the yodl'ed docs in release tar balls?

-FR.




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Re: yodl discontinued.

[Geoff Wing]

Felix Rosencrantz <f_rosencrantz@yahoo.com> typed:
: It looks like yodl, the tool used to build the zsh docs, has been discontinued
: for some time.   Sources can still be found through Debian.

And in the GPL directory on the Zsh FTP sites.

Re: yodl discontinued.

[Clint Adams]

> The yodl home page suggests using texinfo.  It's not clear to me why we use
> yodl over texinfo.  I'm guessing texinfo doesn't create man pages, but yodl can
> create texinfo and man pages.

I would suggest that if anyone is going to expend any effort in
converting from yodl, he should go to DocBook rather than texinfo.

> Though the yodl requirement is sort of a nuisance of the zsh build.  I build
> from CVS.  Do we package the yodl'ed docs in release tar balls?

Yes, both the manpages and the .texi are in the tarballs.

Re: yodl discontinued.

[Oliver Kiddle]

Clint Adams wrote:

> > The yodl home page suggests using texinfo.  It's not clear to me why we use
> > yodl over texinfo.  I'm guessing texinfo doesn't create man pages, but yodl can
> > create texinfo and man pages.
> 
> I would suggest that if anyone is going to expend any effort in
> converting from yodl, he should go to DocBook rather than texinfo.

I agree with this.

I did a bit of investigation into DocBook before. We can get an initial
conversion using makeinfo's --docbook option. The output of that still
needs significant editing, however. From docbook, we'd get decent HTML
output and better PDF output. Once there's a complete open source
XSL-FO implementation, PDF would get better still (currently, it goes
via TeX). Texinfo output seems to require some extra tool and would be
potentially less good. How attached are people to having decent texinfo
output?

Though docbook can produce man pages, we'd probably need to use a bit of
XSLT to get something like our current man pages. It isn't particularly
setup for getting man pages and PDF from the same sources.

There could be other advantages. For exmaple, XSLT could do a much
better job of extracting documentation for builtins for use with the
run-help script. The main advantage, however, is that we wouldn't be
using yodl when yodl is unmaintained.

Oliver

Re: yodl discontinued.

[Peter Stephenson]

Oliver Kiddle wrote:
> I did a bit of investigation into DocBook before. We can get an initial
> conversion using makeinfo's --docbook option. The output of that still
> needs significant editing, however. From docbook, we'd get decent HTML
> output and better PDF output. Once there's a complete open source
> XSL-FO implementation, PDF would get better still (currently, it goes
> via TeX). Texinfo output seems to require some extra tool and would be
> potentially less good. How attached are people to having decent texinfo
> output?

As long as we can get info, I think that's good enough.  If makeinfo
produces DocBook output, is the reverse true?  I don't think we need
texinfo as such since we can get PDF another way.

(I would say, however, that neither of the obvious ways of turning
FO --- the intermediate output stage, akin to DVI --- into PDF is
entirely satisfactory.  Either you need a full Java set up or a
fairly particular TeX set up.  Both are subject to the multiple
dependency problems which will be familiar to anyone who's tried to
get, for example, Gnome's documentation system working from scratch
(though the actually dependencies are different in this case).)

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>                  Software Engineer
CSR Ltd., Science Park, Milton Road,
Cambridge, CB4 0WH, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070


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Re: yodl discontinued.

[James Devenish]

In message <23603.1078142069@csr.com>
on Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 11:54:29AM +0000, Peter Stephenson wrote:
> As long as we can get info, I think that's good enough.  If makeinfo
> produces DocBook output, is the reverse true?  I don't think we need
> texinfo as such since we can get PDF another way.
> 
> (I would say, however, that neither of the obvious ways of turning
> FO --- the intermediate output stage, akin to DVI --- into PDF is
> entirely satisfactory.  Either you need a full Java set up or a
> fairly particular TeX set up.

It is possible to get from DocBook XML to PDF via LaTeX without going
through FO (requires plain old teTeX, but does not require Java unless
you hit xsltproc bugs). I don't know about DocBook-to-info, though.

Re: yodl discontinued.

[Oliver Kiddle]

Peter wrote:
> 
> As long as we can get info, I think that's good enough.  If makeinfo
> produces DocBook output, is the reverse true?

It doesn't do the reverse but there is a tool named docbook2X which does
do it. Seems to use XSLT so it should be easy enough to improve if it
doesn't work as we would like. It also does man which may or may not be
useful. I've not as such tried it.

> (I would say, however, that neither of the obvious ways of turning
> FO --- the intermediate output stage, akin to DVI --- into PDF is
> entirely satisfactory.  Either you need a full Java set up or a
> fairly particular TeX set up.  Both are subject to the multiple

I just took whatever I got from Debian, starting with the xmlto tool and
it all worked well. That was using PassiveTeX. For Java, you must have
been using FOP or something. Sooner or later, a project such as xmlroff
will result in a decent C or C++ implementation which will make it
easier.

Oliver