Re: [gentoo-dev] *DEVELOPMENT* mail list, right?

[Josh Saddler]

Michael Cummings wrote:
> So, fellow devs, what's new with development?

2007.0 handbooks. I am t3h master of the handbooks. They're basically
done, unless I actually hear from arch teams that changes are needed.
I've been working my keister off; I think I racked up >100 commits for
these things. Part of that was to make future updates easier, as I added
conditional evaluations to all the handbooks. This lets an editor make a
single small change to the ToC for some $arch handbook (say, to use a
new kernel version), and those changes will be propagated to every
chapter of that arch HB. Lots of XML <keyval> and <keys> now used for
all arches.

Also, I'm looking into redoing how the handbooks are done in the first
place; right now, we have vast amounts of shared content that are
identical between arches, but are still repeated in each
hb-install-$arch-bootloader.xml file, for example. The existing setup:
within those pages, we can display extra content (or avoid displaying
content) just by doing an XML test to see which handbook you are viewing
(i.e. if you view Sparc, you won't see the x86 partitioning scheme).

I sent a proposal to the gentoo-doc list about turning that on its head,
and instead using several more separate files that include that shared
content, so that we can cut down the duplications in the $arch-foo.xml
files through the use of <include/>s that would pull in that shared
content. End result is that you'd end up with a very trimmed down file
that only includes extra content relevant to that arch, with GuideXML
mojo to yank in the non-arch-specific content. Nifty, eh?