(He steps into the Confessional, and humbly removes his hood...)

You know, oh Monks, I try to be patient with the DocBook people. I try to use Their Tools, even though I regard them as “good for nothing, because they try so hard to be good for everything.” And yet, I cannot conceal my passions... I cannot control them... Nay, I yearn...

For a simple, “it does what I want it to do, with nary a complication or a fuss or a bother,” (therefore) Pure Perl, DocBook toolchain. Something that will, without fuss or complication or meddling with too many Useless Arcane Files, “just do an XSLT transformation and shaddup about it.” I want HTML and CHM and “that's it.”

Prithee, Monks, does such a tool exist? We all know how thoroughly Perl can cut through the :-O !! that is endemic to so many (no doubt, government-sponsored...) computer endeavors. Doth anyone have such a simple application here?

Forsooth, I have seen such gracious tools as docmake, but alas, they rely upon xsltproc, and that tool plungeth headlong into the toilet-plunger of “gratuitous configuration files.” (Or Java, which is infinitely worse... as I am sure you all will agree.)

(He cautiously replaces his hood, but with a hopeful expression on his face...)