the rationale behind switching away from SGML/Docbook is the following:
* SGML is hard to edit for humans
* the output is not much prettier
* the toolchain is not well supported and missing from the build
* the build is not hooked into anywhere, no automation
the reason why RST was chosen:
* it allows for a strong structure like Docbook
* the theme from Read The Docs is pretty
* it also supports mobile devices
* sphinx can easily output to PDF and ePUB formats
* RST is plaintext that can be easily edited and diff'd
* RST can be automatically built by ReadTheDocs and the toolchain is
readily available
* the output is also parsed by Github so documentation can be read
straight from GH
the reason why Markdown was not chosen:
* the current strong structure would be hard to replicate
* markdown is not standardized and output varies according to the
implementation
the docs were converted with Pandoc, using the following commands:
mkdir oper-guide
for source in sgml/oper-guide/*.sgml; do
pandoc --toc -s -f docbook -t rst $source -o oper-guide/$(basename $source .sgml).rst
done
cd oper-guide
sphinx-quickstart
git add *.rst make.bat conf.py
git add -f Makefile
git rm -r ../sgml
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