Re: [Phpgroupware-developers] CVS modules, Makefiles and packages, SGML

[Luca - De Whiskey's - De Vitis]

On Tue, Jun 18, 2002 at 09:15:56PM +0000, Chris Weiss wrote:
> I should clarify this a bit.
> 
> I think what you are proposing is to have only the SGML files in cvs, and to
> generate whetever on "compile" for the packages.  Since there are several of
> us that only install apps from the stable cvs tree, this means that we have
> to have an SGML viewer.  I personally have never used an SMGL viewer and
> don't know what is required to have one.  One thing you can't require is X.
> I will not run X on my dedicated web server and I think it's quite anoying to
> have to also download the doc file local for something can be simply viewed
> with less.  README's and INSTALL files rarely have to be so complexly
> formated that SGML/HTML/any-old-markup is required, and where it would help
> simply providing a url to online docs, whether on the 'net or explaining
> where the docs are installed on your local web server, can easily be done and
> is what I would prefer anyway.

I've never heard of an SGML viewer. Indeed you may use a long list of SGML
compiler to extract plain text, xhtml, postcript, pdf, or whatever documents
format you like (see http://www.sgmltools.org, http://sgmltools-lite.sf.net).
The usefulnes of SGML is in the possibility of distributing a software with
documentation files at 360 degree. In a porject like this, dcomentation is
an important issue for a compleete distribution. You still need no X or
artificiuos viewer. SGML is still a readble text format, so you can use less
in any case. See the skel module for reference on SGML documents.

If you use the stable cvs branch, whenever the Makefiles will be ready, you'll
be able to build and install a tar.gz with a simple command (or get it from
phpgroupware.org for example). I can setup a target to make patches too. 

If you wish i can write a more complicated modules file to let you checkout
only the documentation or we can split the documentation from the php code,
placing it in a separate module.

Looking inside the repository in these days, i've found some modules listing
more then one README file, so i thought we may use only one file with chapter
instead.
I see the need of this information in _EVRY_ module:
- Authors and credits (it seems odd to me that you do not want the world to
  know who did the work).
- Changes (many, many modules, miss this informations).

If you consider that some modules provides one or more README file and
INSTALL file, i think we can collect these information in one file with
chapters:

- README
  1. Authors and credits.
  2. Packaging and installing.
  3. Some info.
  4. Other info.
  5. More info.
  ...

For what concerns the changes, any format is suitable since the only thing
that matter is its existance.

ciao,
-- 
Luca - De Whiskey's - De Vitis              | Elegant or ugly code as well
aliases: Luca ^De [A-Z][A-Za-z\-]*[iy]'\?s$ | as fine or rude sentences have
Luca, a wannabe ``Good guy''.               | something in common: they
local LANG="address@hidden"                     | don't depend on the language.