From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 5804 invoked by alias); 9 Apr 2002 14:06:43 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gdb-patches-help@sources.redhat.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-patches-owner@sources.redhat.com Received: (qmail 5742 invoked from network); 9 Apr 2002 14:06:40 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO nevyn.them.org) (128.2.145.6) by sources.redhat.com with SMTP; 9 Apr 2002 14:06:40 -0000 Received: from drow by nevyn.them.org with local (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 16uwGP-00006x-00; Tue, 09 Apr 2002 10:06:25 -0400 Date: Tue, 09 Apr 2002 07:06:00 -0000 From: Daniel Jacobowitz To: Eli Zaretskii Cc: Andrew Cagney , Rob Savoye , Fernando Nasser , Michael Elizabeth Chastain , gdb-patches@sources.redhat.com Subject: Re: RFC: KFAIL DejaGnu patch Message-ID: <20020409100625.A32579@nevyn.them.org> Mail-Followup-To: Eli Zaretskii , Andrew Cagney , Rob Savoye , Fernando Nasser , Michael Elizabeth Chastain , gdb-patches@sources.redhat.com References: <3CB22901.7000700@cygnus.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.23i X-SW-Source: 2002-04/txt/msg00354.txt.bz2 On Tue, Apr 09, 2002 at 10:51:32AM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote: > > On Mon, 8 Apr 2002, Andrew Cagney wrote: > > > > Yes. DocBook is way better than Texinfo at representing technical documents, > > > than texinfo. Texinfo is great for glorified man pages, but SGML is better > > > for technical manuals. > > > > Why? Is there a posting somewhere explaining the rationale for this? > > > > > While most older GNU projects use texinfo, I see that > > > many newer GNU/Linux projects use DocBook. > > > > None of the ones that I'm interested in - gcc, binutils, gdb - do. It > > is a shame that DejaGnu does as that is the only other tool I really > > depend on. > > I have to agree with Andrew here. Texinfo is good enough for what we > need, especially with the new features introduced in the latest release > 4.2, which also supports XML and DocBook output (in addition to HTML, > Info, and plain text). > > On top of that, since Texinfo is the GNU standard documentation system, > a GNU package, especially an important GNU package such as GDB, should be > honest and use the GNU tools for its documentation. Otherwise the GNU > project could be rightfully accused of hypocrisy. "Good enough for what we need" seems like an awfully bad reason to disagree with another developer's choice of documentation formats. Has either of you ever looked at DocBook source? If not, I recommend casually browsing some - the DejaGNU manual perhaps: http://savannah.gnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/*checkout*/dejagnu/dejagnu/doc/overview.sgml?rev=1.6&content-type=text/plain It is drastically simpler than Texinfo, easy to learn, easy to modify, and only a little harder to write from scratch. And where did GDB using anything but Texinfo come in to this conversation? We're talking about the DejaGNU documentation! -- Daniel Jacobowitz Carnegie Mellon University MontaVista Software Debian GNU/Linux Developer