Re: [docbook] revnumber Required

["John L. Clark" <jlc6@po.cwru.edu>]

On Wed, Oct 27, 2004 at 10:39:33PM +0900, Michael Smith wrote:
> But the official rationale behind making it required is lost in
> the mists of time now. I would speculate that the reason was because
> two revisions might have exactly the same date, so the desire was
> to be able to encourage users to put a unique revnumber on each
> revision to make it uniquely identifiable.

I am reminded of some of my group's other requests - particularly
requests to number sections and paragraphs for easy reference.  To
address those, I am working on appropriate stylesheets, as these seem to
be presentational issues, not content issues.  I wonder about the
difference between this use case and the need to identify revisions (the
elements).

> Also, I don't think the original designers conceived of a revision
> as being a thing that might itself be a list of changes (like CVS
> Changelog files, for example) rather than a single individual
> change.

Typically, I find myself doing a sequence (in time) of changes to a
given document, and then wanting to record a summary of what I've done
for easy reference in a new revision at the "top" of the document.  I'll
admit that I'm conflicted on the appropriate use of the revnumber.  On
one hand it seems useful to be able to consistently refer to one set of
internal changes, but on the other hand it seems confusing to refer to
internal versions independently of other versioning being done.

> Anyway, this seems to me like a case where DocBook is being
> unnecessarily prescriptive. Part of DocBook's mission is to be
> descriptive of the various forms of things that it models
> (reference/man page, revision histories, etc.), rather than trying
> to prescriptively model "ideal" forms of things.
> 
> So, if possible, could you file a Docbook RFE requesting that
> Revision be changed to make Revnumber optional? You can do that
> here:
> 
>   http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=add&group_id=21935&atid=384107

Certainly; I've submitted an RFE[0] as you suggested.  Thanks for your
comments.

Take care,

    John L. Clark

[0] http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1055480&group_id=21935&atid=384107

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