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Subject: DOCBOOK: re: DocBook community of users
I had the same question, myself, in relation to my effort to justify my decision to use DocBook, at work. This info is a little dated (about 2 weeks, at this point): I noticed the download statistics for the Sourceforge DocBook Modular Stylesheets project page. In about the last 2 months, the DSSSL stylesheets have been downloaded about 3,600 times. The XSL ones (disregarding the experimental 1.46 release) have about 2,600. That suggests that as many as 6,000 installations are actively tracking and using just these stylesheet packages!! Furthermore, some projects like the Linux Documentation Project have their own customization and so they may count as only one download, even though they have hundreds (thousands?) of active participants. Finally, consider that these stylesheets are included with RedHat (at least in 7.x) as an rpm, so none of those users are even counted, here. See for yourself: package release date .tar.gz .zip ----------------------------------------------------------------- dsssl 1.74b 2001-11-29 21:00 43 11 1.73 2001-09-28 21:00 2,566 1,078 1.72 2001-08-05 21:00 1,300 738 dsssl-doc 1.74 2001-11-28 06:27 64 24 1.73 2001-09-28 21:00 1,837 660 1.72 2001-08-05 21:00 830 520 xsl 1.47-exp 2001-11-27 21:00 96 46 1.46-exp 2001-10-12 21:00 500 614 1.45 2001-09-28 21:00 1,344 1,299 1.44 2001-08-13 21:00 1,185 1,050 Of course, I have no doubt that maybe 30% to 60% of the downloads are individuals merely out to satisfy some casual curiosity about "this DocBook thing". However, on the other end, you have cases like mine, where a dozen people are using infrastructure that I deployed from only one download. I'm assuming that there probably aren't many who downloaded both the DSSSL stylesheets and the XSL ones. Also, there are those who either use other tools for styling their DocBook, or aren't as proactive about keeping up to date on the latest DSSSL or XSL stylesheets. Finally, I think it's worth reiterating that there are other ways to get these stylesheets that won't be reflected in the above statistics (such as via RedHat RPMs). Anyhow, good luck with your evaluation, decision, and justification. I've got a partially-finished advocacy document and have barely started documenting my industrial-strength deployment strategy. I plan to post these documents, when I finish them, but that may not be for a while. In my opinion, what you really want to focus on is the benefit of using a DocBook-based documentation infrastructure (e.g. the potential for: revision-control, modular document partitioning, vendor and platform independence, scalability, rich semantics, auditing, repurposing for different media, decoupling of content and presentation, etc.) vs. the cost of deployment & maintenance and potentially augmenting the vocabulary to provide semantics better adapted to your field and customizing the stylesheets for the various media and styling requirements you've got. I think the choice is obvious, for projects of any significant scale. Also, it's worth noting that the bulk of the cost of using DocBook is incurred up front. Bare in mind, however, that the highly technical bias of myself an my fellow co-workers, who use DocBook. To gain some of the benefits I mentioned, requires a well thought-out deployment by someone with some knowledge of large-scale system administration and experience in buildsystem engineering. Though a UNIX-like environment is by no means necessary, people with such experience, in a UNIX environment, will tend to have a better handle on these sorts of issues and a means of dealing with them. In the end, though, your usage model expectations/requirements are what really dictates the tradeoffs in which of benefits you can enjoy, and should be one of the primary drivers of your deployment strategy/architecture. Matt Gruenke _________________________________________________________________ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
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