From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Mark Galassi <rosalia@galassi.org>
To: Docbook Tools discussion list <docbook-tools-discuss@sourceware.cygnus.com>
Subject: new tools coming and a couple of renamings
Date: Wed, 27 Dec 2000 06:36:00 -0000
Message-id: <76g0p4w09h.fsf@odie.lanl.gov>
X-SW-Source: 2000/msg00288.html

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?