Well obviously, I'm not using Debian, so getting DocBook working was trial and error. First, I searched for and installed all of the docbook rpms that I had on my install disk (actually iso images that I downloaded). This also included installing all of the dependencies for docbook. Next I played around tried to generate a single html file, but I kept getting an error on a undefined symbols (VERSION in this case). Finally, I noticed the makefile and ran that, but it turned up a bunch of errors because the path names to the style sheets were wrong. I then searched for the style sheets that were giving me errors and created symbolic links to match the paths in the error messages. I was then able to run the makefile, and it worked, but it regenerated all of the html in acs-core-docs. Not wanting to checkin all of the these unchanged docs, I moved the acs-core-docs directory aside and checked it out anew. I then copied the .xml and .html files that I modified from my original directory to the newly checked out directory and checked them in.
Obviously, I've never used docbook before, but it seems that the bar for creating and updating documentation should be lower. Something that should have taken me 30 seconds, took at least a half-hour or more. What do we really get from using docbook other than the ablity to generate documents in other formats? And do we really need to generate those other formats when html docs are so accessible?
