Strategies for Migrating DocBook Customization in a Mixed DB4/5 Environment?

[Thomas Schraitle <tom_schr@web.de>]

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