It has been brought to my attention that people have written
processors to convert docbook reference pages into nroff
suitable for man. I am overjoyed.
Years ago I sought this exact thing and came up empty so I
decided to use yodl. Now I'm converting 1600 lines of yodl
into docbook SGML - and overall the output result is much
nicer but there are still problems - I will have to adjust
the stylesheets and things.
I think I will also tank debiandoc-sgml and put those texts
into a docbook format as well. Wee, unified documentation,
I only need to remember one markup! What could be better?
So, I'm really doing all this so I can sit down and write an
absolutely huge guide on how to use libapt. I'm doing that
because I wrote some Python bidings (and bod is writing perl
ones..). I can expect C++ programmers to grok the source,
but not Ptyhon folks - so a big ole doc is the only answer.
I love writing documents, I expect this will take a good
week to finish, have copious diagrams and things. I'm
targeting something between 50 and 100 printed pages so we
will see how that goes.
Xfree 4 won't stay up on my box. It hangs hard occasionaly,
usually during screen bitmap copies. I guess the Matrox
Mysitque support is slightly untested. That said, X4 is
ungodly fast on this card. It is easially faster than some
fast PIII's at pure graphic ops and it is just a P166!
Still have to add some framework for abstracting the things
Conectiva added, the differences are quite small, but I'm
going to clean some crap up in the process. rpm has some
weird notions, like versioning order differs for depends and
'newness' , but otherwise it is an amazingly clean fit - one
new dependency type, Obsoletes, which is really just
Conflicts+Replaces rolled into one. The fact that APT can
represent both systems fully (it actually will represent RPM
more fully that most RPM tools!) is fairly interesting. I
wonder what other packaging systems out there have the
required structure. If RPM wasn't so ungodly expensive to
generate all the meta data it might be fairly nice.