[TOS] Textbook / Mediawiki / Docbook

[Karsten Wade]

On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 11:39:28AM -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> 
> The python-mwlib package does have a converter script which will
> produce valid DocBook.  The output usually has to be tuned by hand but
> it's somewhat of a time saver.

Yes, that is what I was thinking of using.  My thought was to put a
few hours in to making it work, since it saves at least that much in
manual conversion.

Manual conversion of this amount of text wouldn't be too painful, if
we can't get python-mwlib & mw-render to work.

We want to do this one time only, in one direction.  It is not a
smooth operation, so each conversion is time costly in human
resources.  This was one of my reasons for the complicated columns of
edit % types, so we can be sure all is done first in the
easier-to-collaborate wiki.

Once converted, we want to decide one of two methods for maintenance:

* Consider the XML canonical and stop editing the wiki.
* Consider the wiki the upstream, which means occasional manual
  updates of the XML.

The former is what Fedora Docs does for the release notes.  The latter
is what I am doing at theopensourceway.org/wiki.  The latter is harder
and only worth it for the ongoing value of wiki-based collaboration.
I don't think it's relevant for this textbook project.

- Karsten
-- 
name:  Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Community Gardener
team:                Red Hat Community Architecture 
uri:               http://TheOpenSourceWay.org/wiki
gpg:                                       AD0E0C41
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