[Build-common-hackers] Documenting CDBS
Jonas Smedegaard
dr at jones.dk
Fri Jan 7 13:23:19 UTC 2011
On Fri, Jan 07, 2011 at 10:52:31AM +0100, Marc Dequènes (Duck) wrote:
>Happy new year everybody :-).
Thanks - and likewise. :-)
>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.
Thanks a lot for letting us in on the history of matters. Much
appreciated!
>Since a few months, DH7 is killing most of our users,
Correction: Not debhelper itself, but one (arguably the main) feature
introduced in debhelper 7: short-form dh.
What might confuse matters (statistics etc.) is packagers (like me)
using CDBS and no new features of debhelper, and thus keeping to compat
level 6 to ease backportability of the packaging.
CDBS should work perfectly fine with debhelper 7 (and 8) as long as
avoiding short-form dh.
>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.
...and that is great!
>Nevertheless, if the Team wish to maintain CDBS at least a few more
>years, a merge would be very useful.
I have no plans to abandon CDBS.
>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).
Actually my suggesting Markdown as source format is not for its richness
but lazyness: I already use it extensively for my web design work. ;-)
That said, I find it on par with e.g. textile when it comes to
popularity - as I don't want to end up maintaining it all on my own :-)
Also, I know for a fact that Markdown supports i18n as I wrote that code
for po4a. I noticed you maintain some translation of your docs, Marc,
which would be great to preserve.
>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.
@Felipe: Are you still interested in taking this challenge?
>I'd be happy to follow the progress on this subject. Thanks for
>Cc-ing me about it.
You still want to be kept cc'ed, or are you subscribed to the list and
only want cc to raise awareness on some specifics?
- Jonas
--
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/
[x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/build-common-hackers/attachments/20110107/5f802dd8/attachment.pgp>
More information about the Build-common-hackers
mailing list