Re: [docbook-apps] Strategies for Migrating DocBook Customization in a Mixed DB4/5 Environment?

[Fekete, Róbert <robert.fekete@balabit.com>]

Hi, 

when we made the DB4>5 transition, I had to spend some time to review our customizations. Since I have inherited some of these from ~1.68 stylesheets (not to mention that some of them was pretty obscure), this was really useful to find out if we really needed the customization, and also to check if there was now an easier way to accomplish it (for example, some ugly hacks done in our customizations could be replaced by using new attribute sets).

In the end, our customization layer became significantly more understandable (at least for me), and we managed to get rid of a bunch of unneeded XSL code.

I'd recommend starting with sample document and a clean (read: empty) customization file, then:

 * select a block (or "feature") in your old customization

 * check the DB5 stylesheets that is still the way to do what you want

   * if no, then use a new parameter/method/whatever

   * if yes, then compare the related parts of the DB4 and DB5 stylesheets, see what your customization did to this part, then try to add your customization to the DB5 stylesheet. Then see if it works as expected :)

Regards, 

Robert

On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 10:27 AM, Thomas Schraitle <tom_schr@web.de> wrote:

Hi DocBook users,

currently, I'm trying to migrate our old DocBook 4 sources to version
5. This is pretty straightforward and can be done with some XSLT magic.
The markup side is also well covered in the "DocBook 5.0 Transition
Guide"[1].

However, during this transition, some documents will be kept in DocBook
4. So we end up with a mixed setup for both versions.

(Of course, I could feed my new DocBook 5 sources into my existing XSL
customizations. This "works", but it takes too much time because of the
internal convertion of DocBook 5 to DocBook 4.)

As such, it would be nice to have a clear separation: use the normal,
non-namespace variant for version 4 and the namespace-aware for
version 5.

However, we have some some hefty DocBook XSL customizations; a
"DocBook XSL Transition Guide" would be helpful. :)

How would you deal with such migration of "old" DocBook 4 XSL
customization layers?


Any thoughts are highly appreciated! Thanks! :-)



[1] http://docbook.org/docs/howto/

--
Gruß/Regards,
    Thomas Schraitle

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