Re: avoiding differences between TeX and other formats at beginning

[Patrice Dumas]

On Sat, May 26, 2012 at 09:19:35PM +0000, Karl Berry wrote:
>     Subject: avoiding differences between TeX and other formats at beginning
> 
> I'm not sure.  I'll have to study your message.

This is clearly not for this release, but for the next one.

> Regarding the manual in general, the bulk of it remains as written in
> the 1980s by Bob Chassell, when DVI and Info were the only output
> formats (and plain text, as a poor relation).  His writing style is very
> different from mine.  As I said, I've mostly tried to fix things that
> have become outright wrong, rather than change the overall approach.
> 
> I doubt we want to do a thorough overhaul of it now, which would surely
> delay everything by yet more months.

Quite a bit of changes need to be done nevertheless to update to the
current status of makeinfo, including focusing less on Info and TeX
only.  I don't think this involves doing a thorough overhaul of the
manual, but there are places scattered everywhere that require an
update.  Though I don't think that changing the manual structure is 
needed and instead should be avoided to avoid delaying the release.

But I also think that it is a good thing to do a bit more than updating to
the current status when there is something that really looks wrong.
When reading the 'Beginning a Texinfo File' chapter, the information 
related to headings struck me as being very strangely set up, as if 
things had been addded incrementaly, leading to some inconsistencies 
(well, in my opinion).  Fixing these issues is, in my opinion, not 
different than bugfixing the manual and should be done at any time.

-- 
Pat