Re: bad makeinfo slowdown

[Per Bothner]

On 11/07/2010 02:42 PM, Karl Berry wrote:
> Per,
>
>      I hate to point out the obvious:
>
> Yes, the obvious.  Do you really think we haven't thought about this?

My apologies - I realize you guys have worked hard on a difficult problem.
I was just disappointed by the slowdown - I can live with it.

However, I'm not sure that being able to customize the HTML output
(which Patrice indicated is the primary benefit of the rewrite)
should be a goal of makeinfo.  That seems to require some new
customization framework/language, that will have to be designed,
documented, and tested.  One starts out with simple ways to
customize the output - no problem.  Then people want more complicated
re-writes, conditional processing, re-arranging of text, and you
end up with a general-purpose text transformation system.  (At least
if you give your users what they want!)

It would seem better to use some existing
*separate* language/tool for providing customized HTML.  The
most obvious (to me, at least, since I'm most familiar with it)
is to use docbook and xslt.  Alternatively, makeinfo could produce
some other xml format (e.g. xhtml), and other xml-processing tools
could be used.  xhtml has the advantage that more people are
familiar with it, and it is displayable as-is; docbook has the advantage
that it is closer semantically to texinfo, and we have powerful
tools for processing and customizing docbook.

(You have probably already considered and rejected doing
customization by post-processing, but I'll make a note of
my reasoning for the record.)

I admit using the docbook stylesheets won't solve the
speed problem - running docbook-xslt over the Kawa manual takes even
longer than running the new makeinfo.  However, it would have
the advantage that not everyone has to pay for it; only those
doing customization.

As you know, I've been doing this for years, and I think the
result (see http://gnu.org/software/kawa/) is a pretty decent
demonstration of texinfo customization.
--
        --Per Bothner
address@hidden   http://per.bothner.com/