Re: documentation is now XML

On 11/23/17 15:39, Tom Lane wrote:
> I think we should have a discussion about whether it'd be smart
> to convert the back branches' documentation to XML as well.

My short answer to that is, I don't have time for that. I don't know if
anyone else wants to investigate it. But it took us years to get to
this point, and backpatching and back-testing all of that is just a lot
of work that was not planned. Also, we will want to keep moving
forward. As the title of the thread on -docs shows, some people want to
move to DocBook 5. If every move like that will require backpatching
everything, nobody is going to want to sign up for it anymore.

> The main reason that I want to consider this is that back-patching
> documentation fixes is going to be a huge problem if we don't.

I understand that. I would like to think about a way, maybe a git hook
or wrapper or something, to make that simpler. I haven't found any
promising approach so far, however.

> Using the same doc-building toolchain across all branches seems like a win
> as well. You could argue that switching build requirements in a minor
> release is unfriendly to packagers; but those who build their own docs
> have already had to adapt to the xsltproc/fop toolchain for v10, so
> standardizing on that for 9.3-9.6 as well doesn't seem like it complicates
> their lives. (Possibly we should canvass opinions on pgsql-packagers to
> be sure of that.)

xsltproc has been required since 9.0 for the man pages, so that wouldn't
be a problem.

> Also, we're way overdue for getting out from under the creaky TeX-based
> toolchain for producing PDFs.

Makefile rules to build via FOP have been available since 9.4, so there
is a backup plan there. However, there has also been a fair amount of
tweaking to make things look good before switching in 10, so that would
all have to be collected and analyzed.

--
Peter Eisentraut http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services