Re: docbook-tools, the next generation

[Mark Galassi <rosalia at lanl dot gov>]

    Norman> I'd be happy to coordinate distributions to include
    Norman> appropriate automake stuff. I'll even add it as an RFE for
    Norman> the main DocBook distribution.

OK, I took your bait and added automake to your stylesheets.  The GNU
style tarball is at

ftp://sourceware.cygnus.com/docbook-tools/docbook-stylesheets-1.52.tar.gz

There's a lot to say about what I did, so I'll start:

1. I arbitrarily chose the package name docbook-stylesheets, but can
   change it.  I don't find a claer choice of a package name in what
   you do.

2. The files I added were the top level configure.in, autogen.sh and
   docbook-stylesheets.spec.  Then the Makefile.am files in all
   directories.  The GNU automake/autoconf process adds a bunch of
   other stuff to the tarball so that end users only need a working
   Bourne shell to do the installation, but that stuff should not be
   CVS-controlled since automake adds it itself.

3. Developers should have recent versions of automake and autoconf on
   their system.  Their pattern is that they "cvs .... checkout ..."
   and then run "./autogen.sh" the first timime around.  After that
   they can just install with "make install" for the rest of their
   lives.

4. I noticed that your zip file keeps all the files in the "installed"
   locations and you don't have a program which installs them.  So I
   made the Makefile.am files keep the same exact hierarchy (under)
   $(prefix)/share/docbook-stylesheets.  The only thing I don't put
   there is collateindex.pl which goes into $(prefix)/bin

   This should make things work reasonably well since you can invoke
   jade in the same way, but I have not yet actually tried it.

5. I have built (for kicks; not yet serriously) RPMs with the simple
   "rpm -ta docbook-stylesheets-1.52.tar.gz" and they work.

    Mark> Someone should do a careful reading of the filesystem
    Mark> hierarchy standard to see how to lay things out and what to
    Mark> put in /etc versus /usr/share.

    Norman> Where is that standard?

You can find it at http://www.pathname.com/fhs/

How it applies to DocBook tools was discussed in Jan. 1999 on the
sgml-tools list, but no real progress was made.

    Norman> I'm certainly interested. I have a real problem with this
    Norman> mailing list though. It turns out that the ISP I use when
    Norman> I travel, and I travel too much ;-), has been blacklisted
    Norman> by whatever service this mailing list uses to avoid
    Norman> spammers. So I can't post here when I'm on the road.

    Norman> I'm so pissed about this that I'm "this close" to
    Norman> unsubscribing.

I've asked the sourceware sysadmins to turn that blacklist feature off
on this list and some otherse that I maintain.  Can you give it a bit
more of a chance?