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

[Stefan Monnier]

>>>> 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
>>> It might, yes.  But that sounds like more work than switching input formats
>>> would be,
>> Why?  Are you saying this would require work on our side?  I'd assume
>> this work would mostly be on the Texinfo-maintainers side.
> Haven't the Texinfo maintainers already repeatedly said "yes, we
> know the new version is very slow. We can't find anyone to do the
> necessary work otherwise.", thus forcing the choice between speed
> and unicode support?

That's not what I'm talking about.  I know that the MB/s processed by
Texinfo-5 is much slower than Texinfo-4 and is unlikely to improve
noticeably in the foreseeable future.  What I'm asking is whether
Texinfo-5 could be improved so that it can do the work by processing
fewer megabytes, because it would only process the modified files: the
Elisp manual is about 3MB of Texinfo code, but usually you only work on
a single one of those files, which is at most 300kB, so doing
separate-compilation would give you a speed up of at least 10, making
the result a lot more tolerable (and on which we can have control, so if
it's still not fast enough we can split the manual into smaller files).


        Stefan