Re: documentation is now XML

Hi Peter,

Thank you for taking your time to comment on this long-discussed topic.
I was not around when all the great work was done to implement XSLT 
transforms in branch 10 and convert branch 11 to XML, but judging by 
this thread 
(https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/4ffd72d6-8ab6-37c6-d7d5-dfed8967c0fc%40gmail.com), 
much of the testing was automated and could be re-applied to older 
branches.

Taking into account that both XSLT transforms and testing scripts can be 
reused for the most part, do you think that the benefits of having 
consistent source (easy back-porting of doc patches and one-time 
translation to all languages) in all the supported branches could 
potentially outweigh the inevitable conversion overhead? Are there any 
specific features that make branch 10 considerably different from its 
predecessors that we are missing?


On 04/30/2018 10:20 PM, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> On 4/27/18 11:03, Bruce Momjian wrote:
>> On Fri, Apr 27, 2018 at 11:00:36AM -0400, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>>> On 4/23/18 05:54, Liudmila Mantrova wrote:
>>>> Reading this thread, I got an impression that everyone would benefit
>>>> from converting back branches to XML, but the main concern is lack of
>>>> resources to complete this task. Are there any other issues that affect
>>>> this decision? Looks like Aleksander Lakhin's offer to prepare patches
>>>> was missed somehow as the discussion sidetracked to other issues
>>> That proposal seemed to indicate not only converting the source code to
>>> XML but also the build system to XSL.  The latter is out of the
>>> question, I think.
>> Why is that?
> Because there would be a thousand lines of tooling changes to be
> backported and thousands of pages of documentation to be checked
> manually that it doesn't create a mess (times branches times platforms).
>

-- 
Liudmila Mantrova
Technical writer at Postgres Professional: http://www.postgrespro.com
The Russian Postgres Company