RFC: spec production: appendix, index?

[Jeff Johnson]

The LSB Core books have an Appendix which contains a Alphabetical Listing of
Interfaces, as here:

http://refspecs.linuxbase.org/LSB_4.1.0/LSB-Core-generic/LSB-Core-generic/app-a.html

It seems odd this would exist only for Core, not for anything else. If the
table isn't useful, it could probably be dropped from the Core books; else it
could be extended to everywhere.

The lsbspec tree for 5.0 has previously been extended to generate this
information in all submodule and module subdirectories (this was not done in
earlier lsbspec versions), but the new material is not actually included in any
of the other books. Bug is mainly remind that this seems an unclosed issue.
The reason it might prove useful is that LibGroups are used to split tables of
functions into groups in the body of the books, and sometimes this makes it
harder to find a specific interface (although of course html versions can
easily just search...).

===

Docbook also allows the production of an index, if indexterms have been defined
throughout the book to make it useful. Not sure how well this works with the
docbook versions we're using, current documentation says this (we're using 4.1
sgml, not 5.0 xml):

The DocBook XSL stylesheets can automatically generate a back-of-the-book index
while your document is being processed. You have to do two things:

    * Add an empty <index/> element to your document at the location where you
want the index to appear.

    * Insert indexterm elements throughout your document.

Is this worth pursuing?