Re: Automatic Legalese Generator?

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Tue, May 30, 2000 at 11:35:30PM +1000 or thereabouts, skud@netizen.com.au wrote:
> > > be easier to have this done automatically? Then, if the blurb needs to
> > > change someday, you can update it in one place, instead of in every doc.
> > > 
> > > Just a thought...
> > 
> > I like it. 
> 
> I've done something similar [snip]
> 
> The problem, of course, is making sure that your license is in a known
> location and that everyone's view of the world is the same.  I'm not
> sufficiently familiar with the Gnome CVS tree to know whether this is
> easy, but I'm sure it's possible :)

Ah. I wish. It would be so cool if we could do this. But currently,
GNOME is in different places on different systems, all of which doubtless
fondly believe that they are sticking to the filesystem hierarchy and
it's all the rest which are in error. For example, I think SuSE sees
GNOME as an optional package and puts it in /opt. RH uses /usr as 
the general prefix, and huge amounts of it -- including, of course, 
the help files -- are architecture-independent: thus on my RH system, 
the docs are in /usr/share/. So you'll find a lot of GNOME docs which
refer to $PREFIX/some/path/to/file as a way of getting round "on RH,
it's here, on Debian, it's here, on SuSE, it's here, on NetBSD, it's
here, on Solaris, it's here..."

And I don't think there is a way to get
<!entity licence.sgml system "$prefix/path/name/file.sgml">
                              ^^^^^^^
into the docs, so I think we're stuck :( 

This has been one heck of an issue, actually, because there have been
several cases where we have wanted to refer to other documents which
we can reasonably expect to be on the system, and there doesn't appear
to be a way to do it which will work on all the different Linux distros,
let alone work on *BSD and Solaris too... We are really hoping that we
can somehow do something magical and clever with Nautilus, the file
manager in development which is going to Solve All Our Problems and
Look Really Pretty Whilst Doing So. 

Unless... unless... Well, I was looking at <olink> the other day in the 
DocBook reference book. Unfortunately I don't quite follow the explanation
and example supplied, but it appears to be a way of making links to 
other docs via entities. Could we use this? Would we be able to say
"If the OS/distro is this, the entity is this" with that? Or am I
grasping at straws? 

I'm really bad with entities, and I can't find a single example of
<olink> in use. Has anyone used it? How?

> [ please excuse me if this message is stating the blindingly obvious,
> btw... I don't mean to teach y'all to suck eggs, and probably should
> have lurked a little longer before mouthing off, but I hope you'll find
> the above useful.  By the way, "hi". ]

Hi, yourself. Good to see you. :) 

Telsa