[Build-common-hackers] Documenting CDBS

[Marc Dequènes (Duck)]

Coin,

Happy new year everybody :-).

Quoting Felipe Sateler <fsateler at debian.org>:

> Hmm, the git history of CDBS does not go far enough back in time to
> the fork point. By the first cdbs commit the diff is huge. I think
> some manual merging will be needed. I'll try to do this ASAP.

The fork happened somewhere in 2006, because Peter added a revised  
version of my initial documentation without even telling me. At this  
time the content was made after a wiki page note, which targeted as  
having a funny tone, in order to tell people CDBS was easy and  
pleasant to use, and i was not willing to change this. When i talked  
to him, we had several other disagreements on the content (for more  
serious issues than tone), and neither of us was willing to rework  
everything. A few years later, we agreed on making this merge, but we  
had no real time for this.

Since a few months, DH7 is killing most of our users, so my will to  
work on CDBS has decreased a lot, but i'm still maintaining the  
documentation from time to time, as i think it is still useful.  
Nevertheless, if the Team wish to maintain CDBS at least a few more  
years, a merge would be very useful.

On the format, i agree DocBook is not easy to write, and we probably  
don't have such a need for semantic. KiBi also told me about markdown,  
and the result seems quite clean without much work; i think it would  
be sufficient and faster to write (any other simple markup langage  
could fit too, like textile, but markdown seems richer).

For the method, i guess starting from the content of the most  
up-to-date version, and identify the missing parts, using manual diff  
with the other one, and with existing classes, would probably the best  
road to follow, as the diff is now really huge.

I'd be happy to follow the progress on this subject. Thanks for Cc-ing  
me about it.

Regards.

-- 
Marc Dequènes (Duck)
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