Re: [RFC] Mandatory user doc in KDE review/incubation checklist

On Wed, Jan 14, 2026, at 8:02 PM, Christoph Grüninger wrote:
> Hi Luigi,
> from a technical point of view Docbook seems to be nice. Still, it is 
> uncommon and is a barrier for contributors and incubating projects. 
> Writing XML went out of fashion over a decade ago. By default, I don't 
> have the tool-chain for Docbook installed.

DocBook is very nice for desktop applications, in particular for Linux
packaging.  Extra fonts are not needlessly embedded in a pdf.  There is
already search in applications such as Yelp and khelpcenter so one does
not need a javascript library as is needed for html documentation

XML also allows for many structured transformations and creation of
different output formats so one can have nice web documentation

>
> I would like to see Sphinx or ReStructured Text as official alternatives 
> and not getting the Docbook requirement further cemented. Where 
> possible, we should reduce KDE-specific paths.

Sphinx documentation can be converted to DocBook, have done this
for a number of Python applications.  Cleanest approach is Sphinx to
Texinfo and then Texinfo to DocBook.  Not everyone will want this
toolchain, but it can be automated to run when material is put on
Invent.

>
> Bye
> Christoph
>
> -- 
> Most customers will not accept source code with compile errors in it.
>                   Dan Saks, CppCon 2016 (https://youtu.be/D7Sd8A6_fYU)