DOCBOOK-APPS: selecting a toolchain

["Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday at mindspring dot com>]

  since i'm just about to start transforming some of my
docbook files into PDF, i was looking at the possible 
toolchains and have a couple questions:

  first, since my docs are not that complicated, i was
going to try saxon 7.3.1, just for the fun of it, but
this leads to two issues:

1) is this release compatible with the saxon files that
   are included with the docbook XSL stylesheets, which
   go up to only 6.5?  (i'm planning on upgrading to the
   latest docbook DTD and stylesheets, anyway.)

2) bob stayton's www.sagehill.net docs on installing saxon
   states that saxon comes with a couple .jar files i'm
   going to need, including saxon-fop.jar.  but as i read
   it, saxon 7.3.1 has dropped integration with the apache
   FOP processor, so this file is not included any more.
   
i guess, to make a long story short, should i be considering
this approach -- the latest versions of this stuff?  does this
introduce any difficulties that i should be aware of?

rday