Re: Org mode and Emacs

[Bastien]

Hi Tim,

Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com> writes:

> The question I wonder about is where are we most likely to get the
> majority of our contributions from, those who use org mode and know it
> or those who don't and for those who use org-mode, how many will
> know texinfo?

Recruiting contributors for Org is also a way to recruit contributors
for the GNU project in general, which uses Texinfo as its standard
format for manuals.

For occasional fixes, I don't think the difference between the .texi
and .org format makes that much of a difference.

For substantial contributions, it probably does: but contributors of
these important changes are probably those for which this difference
can easily be overcome -- and *should* be overcome, because they are
also potential contributors for the GNU project.

> (I still find determining if something is a
> known issue or not and the state of progress to resolving it difficult
> to track

(FWIW I agree, that's the motivation behind my work on Woof!.)

> Real problem is the challenge of realising a better
> process given the very very few core contributors available - basically
> a resourcing challenge).

What we don't see so far is the contributors we lose because we use
.org as the format for the manual: Eli is one and there are probably
others.

> At the end of the day, I think the dog food argument is
> important. Having the manual in org format has seen a number of
> improvements and does provide a good and most importantly large and used
> example. Having a sample document which developers could use to verify
> parsers etc would be a good addition, but the problem with such
> documents is they tend not to be maintained and are not actively
> used. There is huge value in having a large and reasonably complex
> document which is being actively updated/enhanced and which is used in
> the real world to produce documents in various formats which are also
> actively read and used. It tends to be in active use of generated
> documents we find more subtle issues, things which tend to be
> missed in cursory scans of test documents.

Full disclosure: the dog food argument never convinced me.  Dog
fooding /per se/ never makes any sense, unless you motivate it with
another good reason.

I suspect our (lispian?) brains is fascinated by recursive stuff (a
rose is a rose is a rose) but this is something we should resist.

Anyway, I won't insist on this anymore, the decision will be that
of all Org core maintainers, of course.

-- 
 Bastien