Re: yodl discontinued.

[Oliver Kiddle <okiddle@yahoo.co.uk>]

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