Re: On being web-friendly and why info must die

[Paul Eggert]

On 12/05/2014 01:51 PM, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> > So if we don't have better alternatives, why not stick with what we
> > >have?
> Because it's ugly, heavyweight, and a barrier to entry.

Although I know Texinfo well and asciidoc poorly and so am naturally 
biased in favor of Texinfo, I can certainly attest to Texinfo being 
heavyweight and having significant problems.  My 3-year-old desktop at 
work currently takes over a minute to create info/elisp.info from 
Emacs's Texinfo sources, and this is so annoyingly slow that it 
discourages me from checking my work when I edit the Elisp manual.

I know some Emacs developers purposely run older versions of Texinfo 
(which are faster) because of this performance problem, and this means 
we can't assume reasonably modern Texinfo features, e.g., good support 
for Unicode characters.

Even though Texinfo made a lot of sense for many years and we should not 
switch lightly, it may now be time to think of switching.  It'd be a win 
if we could use a format with a decently-fast support.