Re: Improve access to documentation in Info format (was: Proposal: Include C Manual from RMS in Emacs git, and/or release)

[Richard Stallman]

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  > 1. Providing an "easy" way for users to see available info manuals and
  >    install them.

I think we should be able to do this.  The way I see is involves two
steps:

a, Set up some sort of download repo with all the Info manuals.

b. Write software to find the desired manual, fetch it, and install it
on your computer.

Would people like tp vplunteer to work on this?

  > 2. Make it easier to generate and perhaps also provide, via 1, Info
  >    manuals for packages that use other documentation generation systems.
  >    A popular candidate to target in this regard is Sphinx.  Sphinx has
  >    some existing support, IIUC, to generate Texinfo output.

In principle I think this is a good idea, but there is a technical
difficulty: it is impossible to produce a fully correct Info manual
from those other formats. because those other formats do not make
the necessary distincions.

It would not be terribly hard to write software which would do this
job _as well as could be done given the current formats_, but the
results will be visibly wrong.

What would be terribly hard is to do a better job than that.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)