Re: [docbook-apps] docbook 4.5 install. Woefully hard?

[Markus Hoenicka <markus.hoenicka@mhoenicka.de>]

Quoting Dave Pawson <davep@dpawson.co.uk>:

> My temptation is to 'start afresh' rather than accept
> an existing install on Linux, since it will work
> from windows and the user will know where stuff is kept!
>

Instructions like these would sure be appreciated by many, as long as  
someone has time enough to keep them updated. I still have such a set  
of instructions for Windows online  
(http://www.mhoenicka.de/software/sgml/sgmlnt.html), but I'm afraid  
the XML part is badly outdated, and I don't have time to fix it  
anytime soon.

Would Cygwin be acceptable for your "client"? Cygwin has a fairly  
complete toolchain for XML processing, although I'm not sure about the  
schema-based DocBook versions. The only thing that remains to be  
solved is to take the guesswork out of the installation. Wouldn't it  
be possible to nudge common package systems, like Linux distros and  
Cygwin, into providing a basic DocBook processing meta package which  
simply installs the essential pieces? It should then be easier to go  
from there if someone doesn't like xsltproc and wants a Java-based  
processor and so on.

regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Hoenicka
markus.hoenicka@cats.de
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http://www.mhoenicka.de