Release plan from now on

Hello again,

Looking at the SourceForge project page,
I've noticed that it's been almost 7 years since I wrote the first versions
of DocBook-to-man-page converters, being unsatisfied with that same
instant(1)-based tool.

And yet docbook2X still isn't at version 1.0.

The explanation is simple.  The implicit (if ambitious) goal I had at
the beginning,
was that "1.0" means "almost everything" in DocBook should work.
The DocBook XSL stylesheets can seriously claim that,
but not any version of docbook2X.

It seems a lot of effort has been wasted in developing older versions (<0.8)
of docbook2X for nothing, but I think, that was unavoidable,
because it is only in the past few years that XSLT worked well enough.
There simply wasn't any alternative to hacky Perl scripts in the early
stages of docbook2X.  I remember there was one time, where half of
docbook2X code
switched to XSLT, but very few people touched it because it required
Java XSLT processors.

Anyway, I have found some other more interesting projects to spend my time on,
even though I regret we haven't reached the "1.0" mark.
As anyone reading the list would probably can infer,
I don't do much DocBook processing any more, and when I do need
to generate man pages from DocBook, docbook2X *works* for me.
Even if it is missing some theoretically nice-to-have features
(e.g. footnotes, which even the DocBook XSL stylesheets have).

So don't count on me adding those features.
If you want them, send patches.  Though I think the
hardest (architectural) parts have already been done:

 * whitespace issues (with introduction of db2x_manxml)
 * character translation (ever since utf8trans came about)
 * tables (starting from a little less than two years ago)
 * fairly good documentation (from the last release);
  though reference documentation is still fairly weak, I haven't heard
any complaints
  so I don't even know if people even read that.
 * scripts to do automated testing (will be in the next release, coming soon)

Perhaps I should name the next release 0.9.0 to mark this point
of development; the code has been sound, I think, since version 0.8.5,
though I wish more people would bang on it.

My release policy after the next release shall be as follows:

 * if I get any patches to integrate, then I will make a minor release
within one month
   for those patches
 * otherwise I will do nothing.

Comments?
--
Steve Cheng
&#x912D;&#x541B;&#x535A;        http://gold-saucer.afraid.org


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