Re: [groff] Release Candidate 1.22.4.rc3

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2018-11-29T00:25:05+0000, Deri wrote:
> I'm interested in the groff book which is currently generated from the
> texinfo document. I have done some work which merges texinfo source
> and several man pages to produce an indexed pdf. It is not ready for
> this release, but I'm hoping to get it accepted for the next.

That sounds terrific!  I'm very much looking forward to that.

The Texinfo manual is far too easy to overlook (I've certainly been
guilty of it) partly because the Texinfo ecosystem itself is not very
healthy.  Last I checked (years ago), the texinfo development mailing
list was openly discussing its options for winding up the project.  It's
just not very ergonomic for anyone except militant Emacs partisans, and
pinfo, the info browser with key bindings friendly to mere mortals, is
no longer actively maintained either, as I understand it.

On top of that, our build does not even generate the manual in TeX form.
Which makes _perfect_ sense from a bootstrapping perspective--one
shouldn't need one typesetting system to build the other--but I suspect
it is in part responsible for the FSF's decision to never offer printed
copies of it.  (Also, one suspects that groff was officially intended to
be nothing but a stopgap while the world migrated to
TeX/Info/Emacs/Hurd.)

It sounds like what you're working on can lead us to set a nice,
ecumenical example.

"make doc_all" is pretty noisy with warnings; we should try to get that
cleaned up.

Regards,
Branden

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