RE: new tools coming and a couple of renamings

[Gregory Leblanc <GLeblanc at cu-portland dot edu>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Galassi [mailto:rosalia@galassi.org]
> Sent: Thursday, July 20, 2000 9:55 PM
> To: Docbook Tools discussion list
> Subject: new tools coming and a couple of renamings
> 
> Dear Docbook Tools enthusiasts,
> 
> After a long period of "no innovation", Eric Bischoff and I (Eric did
> most of the work) are about to put out an up-to-date, orthogonal and
> cleaned-up release of the docbook tools.
> 
> More details will come out soon, but meanwhile I need to poll all of
> you on one issue:
> 
> Some people have been asking us to please change the names db2html,
> db2ps, ... into docbook2html, docbook2ps, ....
> 
> I like the idea for the following reasons:
> 
> 1. The db2* names were not really thought out: they were quick handy
>    scripts at Cygnus.
> 
> 2. The letters "db" come up in "debug", "database", "docbook", and who
>    knows what else.  "db2html" is particularly dangerous.
> 
> 3. I'm not usually impressed with abbreviations.  They make things
>    hard to remember and don't save that much time.
> 
> So my proposal is to deprecate the db2* names in favor of the
> docbook2* names.  This phase-out would be extremely slow, since
> thousands of build procedures use the db2* scripts now.
> 
> Anyone wanna contribute an opinion?

I'm all for the name change, as I always think "IBM's premier database (DB2)
converted into html" rather than "DocBook converted into html".  And if
people want to keep the old names, they just edit their .profile and add
some aliases.  Later,
	Grego