I took another look at this issue, and found that no Red Hat distro is
yet shipping DocBook 5.2; not even Fedora 40 which is bleeding edge.
So I would have to obtain and manually install the relevant DTDs
and style sheets, as would a lot of other contributors. I'm less
familiar with the Debian ecosystem but AFAICT they are shipping
even older docbook packages than Red Hat.
In short, making this conversion now would destroy most contributors'
ability to build the docs at all. Not to mention packagers, who
generally don't have the option to use stuff not yet blessed by their
distro. Since we've lately been encouraging packagers to build the
docs for themselves, that part is likely to be a pain point long
after it stops being one for average contributors.
I don't see how we can migrate to 5.2 until it becomes a lot more
widespread in standard distros.
regards, tom lane
For me it's understandable that Red Hat and others hesitate to integrate DocBook into their distros. The DocBook people spread their results across a lot of sites: docbook, oasis, sourceforge, github, cdn, ... (DTD, XML-schema, Relax-NG; xslt1.0, xslt2.0, xslt3.0; with/without namespace; ...) and even mix it with secondary literature in a less transparent way. It's hard to understand which parts are the necessary core of their product.
For the PG community I would like to raise the question: Do we need DocBook in the distro of any operating system? In the past we developed some stylesheets to adopt DocBook to our needs. They are part of PG's distro and refer to the standard with statements like <xsl:import href=
"http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/xxxx/docbook.xsl"/>. With the migration to db5.x the links change to <xsl:import href=
"http://cdn.docbook.org/release/xsl/1.79.2/xxxx/docbook.xsl"/>. Hence we don't need any additional local stylesheet outside of our own distro. Concerning DTD/schema/relax-ng: In db5.2 there is no DTD nor a XML-schema, for validation we need only the Relax-NG file 'docbook.rng'. This file is available at
https://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.2/os/rng/docbook.rng (during the conversion-process I used a local copy).
I assume we don't need any operating system distro of DocBook. Please correct me, if I'm wrong.
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J. Purtz
