Roughly 1/6 of xorg/xc/doc/specs is FrameMaker files, for example. And ISTR seeing MS Word docs in there at one point. Advantages: open formats are platform independent and generally easier to maintain in CVS.
That's true and we are looking for people to help on the conversion. Would you like to help? The first thing we would need is a plan to follow: The framemaker (and groff) files need to be converted to a format that can be used to create different kinds of documents (XML would be a plausible choice), the conversion (hopefully mostly automatic) would then have to be reviewed. The format that we decide on should be easy to handle. Document writing is a piece of the software development equation that is often ignored as developers prefer writing code over documentation. Therefore making it an unpeasant experience to create new documentation will most likely not produce them more documentation.
When this was discussed at the Xorg arch task force a while ago, there were a couple of people with FrameMaker licenses who offered to use it to read in the existing docs and export to SGML/XML so it could be converted to a more useful format. There's also a similar set of work proposed for the man pages - though that should be simpler since there's just the one format to convert and tools to do most of the work ( http://www.catb.org/~esr/doclifter/ ).
this one shouldn't be assigned to me, i'm not actively working on it.
*** Bug 9866 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Sorry about the phenomenal bug spam, guys. Adding xorg-team@ to the QA contact so bugs don't get lost in future.
http://people.freedesktop.org/~alanc/xkb/ has exports of the XKB docs from Framemaker to other formats that I did a while ago if anyone wants to tackle those.
I think Matt's fixed this now. (There's still some nroff, but that's at least open, unlike Frame.)
There should be ZERO framemaker files left in the tree. Marc Balmer and I discussed this and he converted the into basic xml and I converted those into docbook. They still need polishing (on the list, help would not be turned down) though. There are two troff docs left in the tree. Xt and one other, the name of which I've forgotten.
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