I discussed this with Adam a bit, specifically in regards to me possibly porting my maven jdocbook plugin to run in gradle as well. Adam had some good ideas about writing a generic framework within gradle to make writing documentation-related plugins easier (having it handle translation iteration, output format iteration, etc). This was all on IRC, though, and the discussion is no longer in my IRC client logs so I do not know exactly what he had in mind in total. I offered to help though in anyway by porting over pieces of the jdocbook functionality.

I am also a fan of the Gradle docs and would like this. I tried Steve's gradle-jdocbook plugin (v1.2.1) and it's very close to being a drop in solution that would be good enough for me. Getting it working was relatively painless (one patch to use JDK 7), but the customization is a bit daunting for someone like me who isn't familiar with how all of the transforms and stylesheets work together.

I'd really like to use the gradle-jdocbook plugin, but with a very simple, un-branded theme that would let me ignore everything except the docbook files I'd be writing. The docbook tool-chain is complicated enough that I'd like to close my eyes and pretend it doesn't exist. I'm grateful people are willing to contribute things like Steve's plugin to make life easier for the rest of us and think it would be awesome if it eventually made it's way into the official Gradle distribution.

As announced on the Gradle blog we are planning to completely migrate issues from JIRA to GitHub.

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Thanks again for reporting this issue. We haven't heard back from you after our inquiry from November 15th. We are closing this issue now. Please create an issue on GitHub if you still feel passionate about getting it resolved.