Re: Broken link at http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/

[Patrice Dumas]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 06:32:44PM -0500, Karl Berry wrote:
> You're right, Lionel sent an assignment already.
> Haven't heard from Marbaise or Bachmann for years now, but haven't tried
> hard to track anyone down, either, of course.
> 
> Anyway, it's an interesting hypothetical world we're entering into.  I
> feel I should at least mention it to rms, but if he doesn't have violent
> objections (which he might), and you are willing to work on the missing
> back end(s), and that running tests on actual manuals works out ok, I
> guess I don't have any objection in principle to the replacement.  Oh,

If you want to go down this road, I would certainly need lots of help on
the info backend since I don't know the format. If you are interested in
using texi2html as a makeinfo replacement I could certainly commit to
implement the docbook and xml backends. I don't want to push you,
though, I am not sure that texi2html is the way to go.

> and I guess gettext would have be incorporated.  Anyway, I'd surely love

Currently texi2html has a sort of replacement of gettext for
internationalization. But using gettext instead of reinventing the wheel
would certainly be nice, though I don't know how gettext is done in
perl.

> John, I know you expressed concern about speed, but I guess I just find
> it hard to believe that it would matter that much.  And, perhaps
> texi2html could be sped up; probably not to the point of a compiled
> language, but it sounds like a heck of a lot less work than an
> entirely new implementation.

I never cared about speed, so there is certainly room for improvements, 
but I fear it will still be very very slow compared with makeinfo and
use incredibly more memory.

--
Pat