Cédric Venet wrote:
De : Guillaume Melquiond
Le dimanche 24 juin 2007 à 11:04 +0200, Cédric Venet a écrit :
The fact is if one day, quick book is broken and not supported anymore, you just have to use the last correct version to convert your quickbook doc into docbook and work on the doc book. As far as I understand it, a short term goal of the quickbook developers is actually to get rid of the conversion to boostbook/docbook. So it won't be as easy as you make it sound to get back to a docbook version.
Yes, I remember something like this.
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. 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.
Please correct me if docbook is still intended to be a mandatory intermediate stage between quickbook and html/pdf documentations.
I can't speak for quickbook developers, but it could be useful to have a backend in boostbook or docbook, even if it is not anymore used as an intermediate stage. This involve some development cost, but à priori not too much. It could be useful if someone want to use a custom xslt for his doc (in case of use outside boost, since they try to make a common L&F for boost) or for the sake of having a standardized xml backend.
After it depend on the scope of use they want to give to quickbook.
A boost/docbook backend will still be supported, for sure. Backward compatibility is a paramount concern. Most (all?) quickbook documents, except the most simple ones rely on DocBook. As soon as you start "escaping" to DocBook, you become dependent of it. AFAICT, there is no way to break free of that dependency without sacrificing backward compatibility. Regards, -- Joel de Guzman http://www.boost-consulting.com http://spirit.sf.net