[wsfii-discuss] Re: Whole Infrastructure Catalogue

Tue Oct 18 14:25:17 UTC 2005

Admittedly, DocBook can be non-trivial to setup, but as others have
said, it's not impossible and nor would it be particularly challenging
for most people here to learn how to do it with good documentation and
support.

Note that many have walked this trail before. I'm sure not everyone
has done it the same way, but the DocBook/CVS/SVN combination is
pretty popular and well refined for this purpose.

Wikis don't - as far as I know - provide anything like the
sophistication in versioning that you can get with a proper version
control system. They work well for their intended purpose - ongoing
collaborative editing of web-based documents - but aren't well adapted
for anything else. One of the founding principles of wiki is the
wabi-sabi idea: that everything is imperfect, changing and incomplete.
This is fine for a website but useless for print production.

You need to be able to tag versions at the project level, not at the
page level. You need to be able to separate off a release branch and
polish it to the point that it can be distributed as a version worth
printing. There are many ways of authoring but they would all need to
work with conventional version control for this to happen properly.
Unless polished print documents aren't an objective and
(significantly) imperfect ones are good enough. But I can still
envisage someone taking a snapshot of the wiki at some point and
formatting it for print. What happens when they find a significant
error or omission in their snapshot version?

To put it in concrete terms, how would you produce a print version of
(a subset of) Wikipedia? How would you merge your post-snapshot edits
back into the wiki?

--
Adrian Short