On Sun, Jun 24, 2007 at 08:24:42PM +0800, Joel de Guzman wrote:
No, "get rid" is too strong a term. The real goal is to provide alternative back ends (e.g. direct HTML, LaTEX, DocUtils, etc., in addition to DocBook). This can be achieved through a set of back end template libraries. And, no, I don't think it is a short term goal.
If I understand correctly, pandoc, http://sophos.berkeley.edu/macfarlane/pandoc/ works like this. It works well. I did my best to switch to pandoc but I found markdown to be too limited, especially the lack of code syntax highlighting. So a pandocish tool in C++, that reads Quickbook and writes HTML/latex/whatever, and where one can just add back-ends for new formats/tools... very cool.
The short term goal is to simplify quickbook a lot more than it is now (a targeted 90% reduction in c++ code size) by moving to template libraries. We'll end up with a standard template library with 90% of the functionality of quickbook plus a set of intrinsics in c++ code. *** We're actually striving to make quickbook simpler, not more complex ***
Why? some people, do not like the elaborate tool chain that Doc/BoostBook requires. Some parts of the tool chain, e.g. FOP, is severely broken, XSLT is so slow and difficult to understand and maintain, etc. DocBook is not perfect, you know. It too has its own sets of problems.
I'm one of those people. I wrote a lot of docs in quickbook at one point and lost a couple of days to trying to get FOP to make PDFs. I'd hacked quickbook a little (which itself was fun and educational), but it was nearly impossible to tell where the errors were occurring (xsltproc, the stylesheets, apache-fop... egh.) It was also frustrating that nothing that came of the process was contributable back to boost, just a bunch of shell scripts that didn't do anything generally useful. -t