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

[David Kastrup]

address@hidden (Phillip Lord) writes:

> David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:
>>> At the risk of repeating a point that has been made before, yes, of
>>> course it is the case that for the majority of people who are actively
>>> using texinfo to produce documentation for Emacs, texinfo is not a
>>> problem.
>>>
>>> The incremental approach, however, of first enabling the use of org so
>>> that some of the documentation could be written using it and then
>>> transforming this to texinfo (to work with the rest of the tool chain)
>>> would be interesting. It would, for example, allow you to see whether
>>> org would be a problem for you in a real environment.
>>
>> The main reason brought forward for abandoning Texinfo appears that it
>> has become slower.  So we convert instead to a system that is even
>> slower in order to indirectly produce Texinfo which we will then
>> _additionally_ convert to Info?
>
>
> The main reason *that you accept* for moving from texinfo yes. There are
> other reasons also. Yes, it would be slower.
>
>
>>> If it works, then the eventual aim could be to throw out texinfo and
>>> replace it with org by simple virtual of writing a org->info exported
>>> (direct rather than through texinfo).
>>
>> Would still be slower than now, correct?
>
>
> It's not possible to tell, since direct org->info does not exist. I
> suspect perl text hacking is quicker than emacs lisp hacking, but
> texinfo and org are different input formats.

Well, easy to compare "perl text hacking" with "emacs lisp hacking":
just compare the execution speeds of M-x makeinfo-buffer RET (Perl text
hacking when makeinfo is version 5.x) with M-x texinfo-format-buffer RET
(should be Elisp).

>>> It's the reverse Yoda approach: "try or try not: there is no do".
>>
>> Yes, I understood that this is all about hipsterisms.  But hip does
>> not get the work done or redone.
>
> I am saddened that my humour witticisms have not lightened your day.

The sun tends to do a better job with that.

> I will try and do harder.

Can we focus on the best arguments rather than the best movie insider
jokes?  Working on free software does not really leave much of a budget
for cinema for me, so I prefer not to compete in that area.

> A discussion about text formats for manual pages is not natural
> territory for gags.

That is a feature, not a bug.

-- 
David Kastrup