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

[Stefan Monnier]

> Texinfo 5 uses newer technology and supports Unicode characters etc., but is
> wwwwaaaaayyyyyyy toooo ssllloooooowwww, so slow that it routinely hinders me
> (and no doubt others) from improving the Emacs documentation.

Indeed the slowdown (factor 100 IIRC last time I measured it) is
a serious problem.

> Although I and others have reported the performance bug to the Texinfo
> maintainers, they've made it clear that the problem is not likely to be
> fixed any time soon.

I think I understand why they don't want to fix the processing speed.
But we should still push them to provide workarounds.  "Separate
compilation" would solve this problem: the whole Elisp manual is
enormous, but if we could update the manual by only processing those
files which have changed, then I think the speed of Texinfo-5's
processing would become acceptable.


        Stefan