Help:WikiText DocBookXML Conversion

Goal

There has been a discussion in the CoCoA team whether to use the wiki as its primary repository for the documentation or not. To convince everybody that this is a useful system it would be good to have an implementation to demonstrate that such a system is feasible.

Concept

The concept would look something like this:

• Transfer documentation from current XML based format to WikiText. This will be done manually since there isn't any efficient way to automate this.
• Implement software that
  • translates WikiText to DocbookXML.
  • aggregates the individual pages of a section, i.e. all the pages describing the commands of the CoCoAL.
• Implement makefile need to create documentation in required format out of DocBookXML.

There is some open source software out there that does something similar to what we need, but it would be easier to implement what we need from scratch while reusing some of the code out there. Mabshoff has developed a prototype in python that could be demonstrated at the CoCoA Meeting at Dortmund University, Germany (26.9 - 30.09.2005).

Obviously we should initially test this on a couple of pages from the current CoCoA documentation and go ahead with the conversion if everybody agrees that it works.

Resources

• Not all tags of the WikiText specification will be supported, at least not initially. Hence we have a testpage to demonstrate which tags we currently support.

ToDo

• write more code and do some more testing