Re: texinfo in Google Summer of Code

[Gavin Smith]

On Tue, Feb 09, 2021 at 04:20:15PM -0800, Per Bothner wrote:
> Do we want to mentor a Google Summer of Code student this year?
> 
> I'm particularly interested in EPUB3 support:
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2021-01/msg00008.html
> I can mentor but it would be best to have a co-mentor who understand
> the makeinfo Perl code, which I don't really.

I doubt that I would have much time to help out with this this year.

For the long term health of the Texinfo project, more people do need
to understand this Perl code. Nobody has come forward to write new
back-ends to generate other output formats (LaTeX, Org Mode,
MediaWiki...). I don't think it's much to do with the fact it's
written in Perl. I have some ideas what the problems could be
but would like to hear what others think.

Did you try to understand the code and fail?  What were the difficulties?
Could the code be changed to make it more accessible?

I'm not sure how successful GSoC would be in attracting long-term
contributors.

Regardless of GSoC I would like to have a new Texinfo release soon.
This depends on what issues come up and how quickly they can be fixed
before the release.

> I'd also like to migrate to generating more modern and well-structured
> HTML code.  This could be part of the EPUB3 project, or a separate
> project.
> 
> Other ideas?
> -- 
>       --Per Bothner
> per@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/
>