README

ABOUT
=====
mate-doc-utils is a collection of documentation utilities for the Mate
project.  Notably, it contains utilities for building documentation and
all auxiliary files in your source tree, and it contains the DocBook
XSLT stylesheets that were once distributed with Yelp.

mate-doc-utils is a fork of gnome-doc-utils package.

ORGANIZATION
============
test/
	The test directory contains a number of tests for mate-doc-utils.
	Directories of the form testdocn, where n is a positive integer,
	are skeleton source trees containing documentation, with the same
	layout that would be used by actual projects.

	The testdocs directory contains the unit tests from docbook-testdocs,
	developed by Norm and Co. for the pan-galactic DocBook stylesheets.
	An additional README file is in that directory, giving instructions
	on extending or changing any of the files in mate-doc-utils CVS.

doc/
	The doc directory contains documentation for mate-doc-utils.  In
	most cases, mate-doc-utils is required to build its documentation.
	Mechanisms are in place for bootstrapping.

xslt/
	The xslt directory contains all of the XSLT in mate-doc-utils.
	Notably, the xslt/docbook directory contains the DocBook XSLT,
	and xslt/gettext contains the XSLT gettext utility for translating
	automatic text.
   
sandbox/
	The sandbox directory is not DISTed, so it will only appear if you
	have a CVS checkout.  It's a playground for new ideas.

xml2po/
	The xml2po directory contains the xml2po tool developed by Danilo
	Segan for translation of arbitrary XML formats.  It is used by
	mate-doc-utils for DocBook translation.

TESTING
=======
Under the test directory are a number of tests for mate-doc-utils.  To
test the build system (mate-doc-utils.m4 and mate-doc-utils.make), you
can use any of the testdocn (for n a positive integer) directories.  These
are set up as skeleton source trees, behaving exactly as a real project
would.  Also, mate-doc-utils uses itself to build its own documentation
(under doc), so mate-doc-utils itself is a test of the build tools.

To test the DocBook stylesheets, use the test/testdocs directory.  These
unit tests are from the docbook-testdocs package on docbook.sourceforge.net,
developed by Norm and Co.  Simply typing make in that directory will build
each test.  If the name of the test file is foo.001.xml, the output will be
html/foo.001/foo.001.html.  Each test generally tests a small number of
related DocBook elements.  Many of the features of DocBook or of the XSLT
in mate-doc-utils might not be tested by these.  Additional tests may
be added; follow the instructions in test/testdocs/README for that.

Also useful for testing the XSLT is to transform some large documents
using it.  The Mate User Guide and the Gnumeric Manual both serve as
excellent test docs.

HACKING
=======
Unlike most C programming, working on much of mate-doc-utils really does
involve isolated incremental improvements.  There's no way to give a short
list of broad features in a TODO list.

To work on the build tools (mate-doc-utils.m4 and mate-doc-utils.make),
build the test docs and see what doesn't work.  mate-doc-utils.make has
a list of all the high-level targets that should be fully supported.

To work on the DocBook XSLT, find an element that isn't implemented yet and
implement it.  If you have XML Starlet (xmlstar.sourceforge.net) installed, 
you can type 'make report.html' in the xslt/docbook/html directory to get
a nice HTML report on what elements are implemented.  There is also a TODO
file in this directory with a very succinct list of matches that need to be
done that can't be caught by report.html.

Note that the XSLT is documented inline with xsldoc, which is itself a part
of mate-doc-utils.  Feel free to work on xsldoc as well.  The documentation
generated by xsldoc is included in the manual under doc/xslt.