Re: [boost] Boost documentation

From: Joel de Guzman (joel_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-06-23 08:30:45

Gennadiy Rozental wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've been offline for a bit. But I was able to spend several weeks learning 
> DocBook. I must say I was really impressed with quality of this project. I 
> also tried to get a grasp of BoostBook and gave perfunctory look on 
> quickbook. Here I would like to share my thoughts on recent "doc update" 
> movement.
> 
> I. quickbook as documentation media.
> 
>   Why, oh, why don't we learn from our own mistakes. We just started to 
> realize the problem we got ourselves into with makesystem. And immediately 
> find new toy to play with. However fun it is, however cool it might look on 
> first sight, THIS IS NOT OUR BUSENESS to invent/support documentation 
> format.

It is my business :-). As much as I like writing libraries, I also like
writing tools. And it *is* easy to support. It is merely a very thin layer
on top of docbook.  It is very easy to understand, extend and maintain.
I am not the sole maintainer. It's being maintained by some folks and
I do get some contributions from a few more. IOTW, it's not a one-man-show.
And, it is not a new toy. It's been with us since 2002.

>  DocBook is very mature, well supported project. It's based on widely 
> accepted/supported technologies. It's powerful and configurable to implement 
> essentially anything one need. 

quickbook *is* docbook. What's the worry? If you get paranoid, you
can just dump into xml and forget about quickbook. Nothing lost!

> I personally don't see much valid reasons to 
> look in home grown format direction. 

Well, you can't please everybody ;) The good thing is, you don't need
to use it if you don't want to.

Regards,
-- 
Joel de Guzman
http://www.boost-consulting.com
http://spirit.sf.net