Re: Kernel docs: muddying the waters a bit

[One Thousand Gnomes]

> DocBook is a means to an end; nobody really wants DocBook itself as far
> as I can tell. 

We only have docbook because it was the tool of choice rather a lot of
years ago to then get useful output formats. It was just inherited when
borrowed the original scripts from Gnome/Gtk. It's still the most
effective way IMHO of building big structured documents out of the kernel.

The Gtk people long ago rewrote the original document script into a real
tool so they have some different and maintained tools that are close to
equivalent and already have some markdown support. Before we go off and
re-invent the wheel it might be worth just borrowing their wheel and
tweaking it as needed ? In particular they can generate help indexes so
that the entire output becomes nicely browsable with an HTML based help
browser.

Alan