[docs-discuss] [on-discuss] DevRef source format

[Roland Mainz]

Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> Roland Mainz wrote:
> > AFAIK the same arguments were done more than twenty years ago for the
> > X11 documentation. Instead of sticking with a standard format the X11
> > Consortium picked an application-specific format to do most of the X11
> > documentation. Twenty years later these files were simply "blobs of raw
> > data" where the applications weren't available anymore (and even if you
> > had binaries you needed a license key), the file format documentation
> > was incomplete (making it impossible to write a converter) and the
> > people who originally wrote the documentation were long retired or
> > "gone". At the end all these documents were unuseable, unsalvageable and
> > simply "lost" - because twenty years ago someone picked the "hip&&cool
> > file format of the month".
> 
> Don't be overly dramatic
[snip]

I didn't want to be dramatic, I was trying to reflect the state we had
when I was the release manager for the X.org X11R6.8.2 release. Back
then it looked quite bad (and I lost touch with the X.org stuff since
X11R7.0 and didn't knew yet that you found a way to salvave some of the
documents).

----

Bye,
Roland

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