Please check out files in this WWW-directory:

http://iki.fi/juhtolv/tmp/bugreports/python-docutils/01/harjoitukset/

When I run that script called compileall.sh almost everything works
like a charm. Even Tidy thinks XML-code that rst2xml created is valid.
But when Publican tries to validate (let alone convert) that XML-code,
it gives umpteen gazillion errors. They all can be seen in that file
publican_errors.txt .

Publican is in a Debian-package called publican.

Would you please do something, that makes it possible to convert
RST-code to XML suitable for Publican? And please document it well.

severity 611233 wishlist
retitle 611233 python-docutils: please provide reStructuredText -> DocBook XML converter
thanks

* Juhapekka Tolvanen <juhtolv@iki.fi>, 2011-01-27, 04:13:

Thanks for your bug report. I'm afraid that errors you are seeing are
expected: rst2xml doesn't produce DocBook XML documents (and it was
never intended to do so!), which is the format Publican expects.

I retitled the bug report and changed its severity accordingly, but to
be honest, it's unlikely it will be fixed any time soon.

The question about rST->DocBook conversion has been asked on the
Docutils mailing list at least once[0]. Also, at least according to its
package description, pandoc[1] is able to do the necessary conversion.

[0] http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=87bqd24osa.wl%25lele%40nautilus.homeip.net&forum_name=docutils-develop
[1] http://packages.debian.org/sid/pandoc

On Fri, 28 Jan 2011, +07:21:03 EET (UTC +0200),
Jakub Wilk <jwilk@debian.org> pressed some keys:

Yes, I was wrong. Just few hours after sending my bug report I
remembered that pandoc and started to use it. Unfortunately it has
some nasty bugs that hit me very badly, at least #611328 and #610583 .

On Thu, 27 Jan 2011, +15:54:40 EET (UTC +0200),
Jakub Wilk <jwilk@debian.org> pressed some keys:

Why on earth they waste their time coding and maintaining some
utility, that outputs XML-code written in neverheard-DTD? And that
tool called rst2pseudoxml must be even more ridiculous waste of time.
What good is it?

Almost everybody who knows at least something about XML have heard
about a DTD called Docbook and therefore probably starts using it.
Docbook is probably the most used XML-DTD in the world. Are those
developers of python-docutils living inside a bottle or barrel?

Meanwhile I use pandoc, but it would be nice, if python-docutils
included some tool for converting RST to Docbook-XML.

* Juhapekka Tolvanen <juhtolv@iki.fi>, 2011-10-01, 17:43:

First of all, telling volunteers how they should or should not spend
their free time is impolite (and ineffective). But it's not like
upstream developers of Docutils spent months on developing these output
formats. They are both just simple dumps of data structures that
Docutils uses internally.

rst2xml comes handy when you need to convert rST to another (not
necessarily XML-based) format that is not directly supported by
Docutils, but you don't want to dig into Python sources. In the past,
before the advent of rst2man, we (Debian packagers) did use it to
generate manual pages.

rst2pseudoxml is useful for debugging purposes, as its output is more
human-readable than XML.

For your information, insults won't help you persuade them to implement
your pet feature.