Re: @dircategory (Re: Translating Emacs manuals is of strategic importance)

[Patrice Dumas <pertusus@free.fr>]

On Mon, Jan 22, 2024 at 08:48:03AM +0000, Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
> > It's questionable whether this would be a correct use of <collabname>
> > and <authorgroup> or not.  The online DocBook documentation says,
> > 
> > "The AuthorGroup element is a wrapper around multiple authors or other
> > collaborators."
> > 
> > <https://tdg.docbook.org/tdg/4.5/authorgroup>
> 
> I guess there is a reason why you refer to DocBook 4.5 and not DocBook 5.0?

It is because texi2any generates DocBook 4.5.  I have no idea which
should be our target.  I do not want to maintain conversion to different
DocBook versions.  It seems that there is an xslt to convert 4.5 to 5,
this is in favor of outputing 4.5, but if nobody uses 4.5 anymore, it
may be right to switch to 5.0, I don't know.  If, however, there are
still many applications that prefer 4.5, we could stay with 4.5.

> https://tdg.docbook.org/tdg/5.0/ch01#introduction-whats-new
> 
> collabname and a few others have been merged into orgname.
> 
> collab now has the following children:  affiliation, org, orgname, person, personname.
> 
> https://tdg.docbook.org/tdg/5.0/collab

That's actually an issue for conversion from Texinfo, as it means that
the generic collabname is gone, we have to choose between org/orgname,
which is inadequate, and person/personname which is not usable, as it is
incorrect when @author corresponds to many authors, and even if there is
one author, in Texinfo there is no way to get the elements of a name
needed for personname.  I am not sure that we used collabname correctly,
but at least it was practical.

Ideas to convert te lax Texinfo @author to DocBook 5 are welcome...

-- 
Pat