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Texinfo of the Cygwin API Reference and User's Guide


After a lot of trying and then a lot of help on the docbook-apps 
mailing list, I now have texi and info versions of the Cygwin API 
Reference and User's Guide. They are available for perusal and/or download:

http://www.iocc.com/~joshua/cygwin/

These are produced from slightly outdated versions of the DocBook SGML
that I have been "testing" with, so don't be shocked by things that have
been removed from the CVS. Also note that for download simplicity I 
combined all the ug-net.info* files into one. You can read the info files
with a command like "pinfo -r ./ug-net.info.bz2" after downloading. The
current release of newlib causes problems with info and compressed files. 

This conversion (SGML DocBook->texinfo) was accomplished using docbook2X:

http://docbook2x.sourceforge.net/

Note that I say "was accomplised" and not "I". I don't actually have a
working docbook2X installation, and I failed to get one set up on Cygwin.
The website lists a lot of perl modules, some of which I couldn't get
working. (I'm no perl guru, though.) A kind fellow on the docbook-apps
with a working docbook2X did it for me:

http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/200209/msg00082.html

This is unfortunate. Now, the fun part: why?

1. There are no info files for Cygwin. I've done some basic man pages, but
since GNU packages are IMO the core of Cygwin it would be better to be able
to say "use info (oh, and there's a HTML manual too)" than 
"use info for all GNU packages and the HTML for Cygwin".

2. As some others have mentioned, DocBook is rather a pain to set up on 
Cygwin, and there are not supported packages for every part. Texinfo and
tetex (supported) provided all I needed to set up both info and HTML (and
dvi, ps, pdf, etc, though I didn't actually do this). This would only be
an advantage if we moved away from DocBook as the primary documentation method.

Note that using a tool such as texi2db (which was much easier to set up than 
docbook2x, about the same as the DocBook tools) to set up the website we 
would still be at the same relative complexity level but still gain the info
files without making any other user-visible changes. In theory.

3. Because it's there. (BTW, I am still trying to get a docbook2X together.)

Now: 

[ ] just get a new cygwin-doc package together with the info files.

[ ] Texinfo should become some sort of supported form of Cygwin documentation

[ ] Neither, I'm blocking all @yahoo.com email anyway and not reading this. 


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