Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] db2omf

[Dan M. <da...@ea...>]

On Thu, 8 Mar 2001, David Merrill wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 01:22:06PM -0800, Dan Mueth wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > On Thu, 8 Mar 2001, David Merrill wrote:
> > 
> > > Has anyone done any work toward creating omf from docbook sgml/xml
> > > sources? I want to do some testing of LDP packaging for use with
> > > scrollkeeper. I would like to not have to maintain omf separately from
> > > our docbook if that is possible.
> > > 
> > > I'd be happy to help expand the sk documentation as I go along.
> > > 
> > > Any other tips gratefully accepted!
> > 
> > Dave,
> > 
> > Nobody has started work on this yet and this would be a valuable addition
> > to scrollkeeper.  This is especially true since most documentation is in
> > DocBook.  There are two problems that come to mind:
> > 1) DocBook does not yet support all of the OMF tags
> > 2) The OMF DTD will be changing somewhat, since it is not in
> > complete agreement with the OMF specification and because we are
> > discussing adding a couple new elements or attributes.
> > 
> > However, both of these are very solvable problems, and really need to be
> > solved.  Norman Walsh has agreed to help get the necessary tags into
> > DocBook.  And fixing the DTD is a matter of somebody (Gregory Leblanc I
> > think is the maintainer of the DTD) putting in some time and resolving the
> > outstanding issues on the ldp-meta mailing list.
> > 
> > If you'd like to get started anyway, realizing that things will be in a
> > state of flux for a little while, that would be great.  In the short term,
> > people could run it manually to generate partially completed OMF file
> > templates and then manually fill in the missing bits.  In the longer term,
> > we can have scrollkeeper-preinstall run db2omf on DocBook files so that
> > the OMF files are not created until build time.
> > 
> > BTW: I wasn't sure what you meant by "testing of LDP packaging", but I
> > have almost finished a new example package which illustrates one of the
> > simpler ways to set up a package to use scrollkeeper and handle DocBook
> > properly, and it provides templates and some documentation to make things
> > easier.  I'm hoping to release it today.
> 
> My immediate goal is to establish docbook guidelines for our authors,
> so that their docbook is omf-ready, and to position us to fully
> support scrollkeeper. I keep the LDP up to date with what sk is doing,
> or at least as up to date as *I* am.

This is good to hear.

> An LDP volunteer is going to work on a db2omf script, and I will send
> it to you when it is ready. I asked him to license GPL so you can use
> it without license issues.

Thanks.  We have licensed scrollkeeper under the LGPL because it will
become a proper library.  Since it makes sense to have db2omf be a part of
scrollkeeper so that the OMF is generated from the DocBook at install
time, we would need to license it under the LGPL.  Would this be okay with
you?

> If scrollkeeper is going to generate omf from db directly, then does
> that mean the LDP won't need to generate omf for you? That was the
> basis of my thinking, and if that goes away then we don't really need
> to do anything extra. But we'll still work on the db2omf script.

I think it will be a while until we get to this step.  First we have to
finalize the OMF DTD and then we have to get it accepted into DocBook and
wait for a DocBook release to incorporate it.  I suspect the DocBook
process will take a long time.

I'm hoping to have the OMF DTD figured out within the next month or two
and then start the DocBook process.

Dan