[Monotone-devel] Documentation Texinfo XML to Wiki converter

[Philipp Gröschler]

In the course of the current Mini Summit I spent the afternoon hacking
on a (yet still) small XSLT file whose purpose will be the conversion of
Monotone's Texinfo Documentation to a set of multiple files which can be
used for the Wiki. Unfortunately I have to use a rather new Java based
version of Saxon [1] for the transformation process, because neither
Gnome's libxml nor Apache Xalan where able to process a XSLT 2.0
template, which is needed for the file splitting and some regular
expression stuff. XSLT 1.0 and 1.1 do not have these features AFAIK, or
only as vendor specific extensions, which doesn't help either.

The current state is that the XSLT searches the whole Texinfo XML file,
collects the node hierarchy and therefrom builds up a directory
structure with one file for each node (or rather: chapter).

Next task would be to take each chapter's XML code and transform it to
the desired output format. Currently I have the choice between HTML and
the Wiki's own MDWN format, with the possibility to implement both and
allow the user to chose between the two before the actual
transformation. The number of target formats is not limited and is only
depending on how many of them will be needed and, after all, how many
complete and working style transformation templates will be created.

So the question at the moment is: which output format would be the most
useful? According to Thomas Keller there could be some formatting
limitations in the Wiki format, but due to lacking experience with that
format I can't affirm that. What I can say is that HTML can surely cope
with almost everything, but would likely be more time consuming to
implement. Also it could be more reasonable to directly create files for
the Wiki, since HTML can already be created by makeinfo, though lacking
Monotone's Wiki style.

That's it for the moment!

Greetings,

Philipp