Re: V4L docs and docbook

[Russel Winder <russel@winder.org.uk>]

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On Wed, 2016-02-17 at 21:51 -0200, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
> […]
> 
> We have 2 types of documentation for the Kernel part of the
> subsystem,
> Both using DocBook:
> - The uAPI documentation:
> 	https://linuxtv.org/downloads/v4l-dvb-apis
> - The kAPI documentation:
> 	https://linuxtv.org/downloads/v4l-dvb-internals/device-drivers/
> mediadev.html
[…]

I may not be introducing new data here but…

Whilst ReStructuredText and Markdown are fairly popular text markup
languages, they are not related to the DocBook/XML toolchain.

Many people, especially authors of books etc. are not really willing to
write in DocBook/XML even though it is the re-purposable representation
of choice for most of the major publishers. This led to ASCIIDoc.

ASCIIDoc is a plain text markup language in the same way
ReStructuredText and Markdown are, but it's intention was always to be
a lightweight front end to DocBook/XML so as to allow authors to write
in a nice markup language but work with the DocBook/XML toolchain.

ASCIIDoc has gained quite a strong following. So much so that it now
has a life of its own separate from the DocBook/XML tool chain. There
is ASCIIDoctor which generates PDF, HTML,… from the source without
using DocBook/XML, yet the source can quite happily go through a
DocBook/XML toolchain as well.

Many of the open source projects I am involved with are now using
ASCIIDoctor as the documentation form. This has increased the number of
non-main-contributor contributions via pull requests. It is so much
easier to work with ASCIIDoc(tor) source than DocBook/XML source. 
 
-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder


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