[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] Making Haskell more open

[Gour]

Sven Panne (Sven.Panne at aedion.de) wrote:

> Great! If you have already an XML editor, start writing DocBook now! :-)

No, I won't :-)

> More seriously: This is again a useless tools discussion, we *are* using 
> DocBook currently and it works fine. The real problem is not the XML format 
> and any XML toolchain, it is the lack of people willing to write 
> documentation. 

Nobody said that DocBook does not work fine. However let me quote SPJ's
message: 

<quote>
However, I still wonder if there are things we could do that would make
it easier for people to contribute.  Here are two concrete suggestions:
  ^^^^^^^
- Make it possible for people to add comments, explanations, or
  questions to
        * The GHC user manual [currently generated using DocBook]
        * The Haskell 98 Report
  The idea would be that anyone could help improve these documents,
                        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  and that, at least in the case of the GHC user manual, we could
  use the comments to help clarify the text.
</quote>

So, the whole discussion, at least from my side, was to offer
suggestions to make it easier for more people to contribute to the whole
haskell community.

For those who are satisfied with the present setup or think that
newsgroups are panacea forthe whole problem - fine.

My reasoning tells me that Simon is thinking differently and therefore I
suggested creating portal site with ticket system with the darcs backend, 
forums etc. so that new/old users can choose what is best suited for
them.

So, I wonder how 'txt2tags' produced so much traffic here and the tool
uses (almost) the same markup as MoinMoin wiki used for the present
HaWiki system (txt2tags even produces MoinMoin output :-)

> There are enough people in the various fptools projects (including me)
> who will happily and quickly accept documentation patches, be it in
> plain text or DocBook. And if we are honest: Whoever will contribute
> to the GHC/Happy/... documentation with a non-trivial amount of text
> has very probably suffered through the build process, anyway, and
> getting the XML tools up and running has been the least problem
> then...

Following the same logic, we do not need darcs 'cause " Whoever will contribute
to the GHC/Happy/...with a non-trivial amount of.." code "..has very probably 
suffered through.." using CVS system :-)

Thank you for your input. I think that I offered enough 'why' to my
suggestion, so there is no need for further "useless tools discussion"
;)

Sincerely,
Gour

> P.S.: In a Google search, DocBook XML dominated txt2tags by a factor of 29, 
> and an amazon.de search showed 7:0 books... >:-)

Hmmm, "DocBook XML" gives ~ 608 000, while txt2tags gives ~ 73 000
which gives factor of: ~8.

otoh, LaTeX dominates over DocBook by a factor of ~ 38 :-))

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