Re: [Fwd: Re: [Announce] Borges: a DocBook XML Documentation Management System]

[David Merrill <david lupercalia net>]

On Sat, Jun 29, 2002 at 08:33:26AM -0600, John Fleck wrote:
> On Sat, 2002-06-29 at 06:04, David Merrill wrote:
> > On Fri, Jun 28, 2002 at 09:28:09PM -0600, John Fleck wrote:
> > > Bouncing from list to list....
> > > 
> > 
> > Pretty cool, n'est ce pas? I wonder how this should affect Lampadas
> > development.
> > 
> 
> I have this half-written thing on my desktop that I keep trying to get
> finished and sent off to the docs list - "lessons learned from GNOME and
> stuff we need to fix."
> 
> Item one on it is "we need to fix the damn doctable - we need some sort
> of documentation tracking system so we can stay organized." I don't know
> whether it's Lampadas (my personal favorite just 'cause I've followed it
> a bit) or Borges or some modification of our existing infrastructure,
> but we need something!

(FWIW, I can install you a LDPDB in a day if you want one and if it
will help. And there will be a conversion script to port that data
into Lampadas when it becomes available.)

As far as whether to use Lampads or Borges...

Depends what you need. Much of what Lampadas will do are things that
are not particularly important to the GDP: providing PDF, Plucker,
PostScript, DocBook XML formats for all documents, editing documents
online, mirroring documents from other sources, and allowing readers
to annotate docs. Support for Texinfo sources.

Or at least I don't think you consider those very important. Perhaps
I'm wrong, though.

Lampadas is very strongly oriented toward comprehensive web
management and collaboration. I'm planning for the future to have
features such as:

	a "tips" database where readers can post
	a Q&A database where users can get help from each other
	republish all docs in RH 7.1, Debian sid, etc.
	selected articles from the Wikipedia and other Wikis
	ability to host a complete website built around the docs

Plus lots of mirroring capabilities, so the LDP can mirror the
jargon file, the GNU manuals, the FOLDOC.

and so on. Borges is focused around a project team, where Lampadas is
intended to build a reader community, all of whom can contribute to
the documentation (like a Wiki somewhat, and a bit like Scoop even).

After a quick look, Borges seems to require more console level work,
and editing of raw XML. Lampadas is oriented more towards real
beginners -- no need to learn DocBook at all in order to produce
DocBook documents.

But Borges seems farther along in development. It's hard to say, since
while Lampadas is not at all usable at this exact moment, it is also
not terribly far away from being ready. It is just SMOP to get there.
The hard stuff has all been done, really. I expect to have a beta in
around 1.5 months.

Obviously I am biased toward Lampadas. It will be really unique, a
whole new class of application that has never been done before. And it
is very ambitious. But I can't say that Lampadas will fit your needs
better, since many of the neatest things about Lampadas might not help
you in your work.

FWIW, since they both support cvs integration, it shouldn't be too
hard to switch, either way, so neither one is a huge commitment. It
wouldn't even be all that hard to write some code to copy data either
way.

-- 
David C. Merrill                         http://www.lupercalia.net
Linux Documentation Project                   david lupercalia net
Lead Developer                                 http://www.tldp.org


What do you despise? By this are you truly known.
	-- from "Manual of Muad'Dib by the Princess Irulan