gnus-faq.texi: very old?

gnus-faq.texi: very old?

[Kai Großjohann]

A few minutes ago I extended the documentation for the %t group line
format specifier.  I thought it might be useful to add a FAQ entry, so
I looked in gnus-faq.texi.  There I saw that Gnus 5.0.10 (!) is the
most current version of Gnus.

This makes me wonder: is gnus-faq.texi the right place to edit when
editing the FAQ?

kai
-- 
~/.signature: No such file or directory

Re: gnus-faq.texi: very old?

[Simon Josefsson]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> This makes me wonder: is gnus-faq.texi the right place to edit when
> editing the FAQ?

Probably not, given the first sentence of gnus-faq.texi (quoted
below).  Um, but that URL doesn't even work, fixed.

This is the Gnus Frequently Asked Questions list.
If you have a Web browser, the official hypertext version is at
@file{http://www.ccs.neu.edu/software/gnus/}, and has
probably been updated since you got this manual.

Re: gnus-faq.texi: very old?

[Justin Sheehy]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> This makes me wonder: is gnus-faq.texi the right place to edit when
> editing the FAQ?

No, sending mail to me is the right way to edit the FAQ.  :-)

However, if someone feels like texifying the current FAQ, I won't
complain one bit.  I've been meaning to update the texi version for,
um, a very long time and haven't managed to make myself do it yet.

The canonical version is at http://www.ccs.neu.edu/software/contrib/gnus/

I also post it to several newsgroups once a month in plaintext form.

-Justin

 

Re: gnus-faq.texi: very old?

[Jesper Harder]

justin@iago.org (Justin Sheehy) writes:

> The canonical version is at http://www.ccs.neu.edu/software/contrib/gnus/
> 
> I also post it to several newsgroups once a month in plaintext form.

Which newsgroups? I don't think I've ever seen it in gnu.emacs.gnus or
any of the other Emacs newsgroups.

Re: gnus-faq.texi: very old?

[Justin Sheehy]

Jesper Harder <harder@ifa.au.dk> writes:

> Which newsgroups? I don't think I've ever seen it in gnu.emacs.gnus or
> any of the other Emacs newsgroups.

It goes to gnu.emacs.gnus and several others every month.

The full list of newsgroups it is posted to:

gnu.emacs.gnus
gnu.emacs.help
comp.emacs.xemacs
comp.emacs
news.software.readers
comp.answers
news.answers

In about a week it will go out again.

-Justin

 

Re: gnus-faq.texi: very old?

[Kai Großjohann]

On Wed, 11 Jul 2001, Justin Sheehy wrote:

> However, if someone feels like texifying the current FAQ, I won't
> complain one bit.  I've been meaning to update the texi version for,
> um, a very long time and haven't managed to make myself do it yet.

Is it goint to be maintained as *.texi from then on?  If *.texi will
not be the main source format, then it should be generated
automatically from whatever the main source file format is.

Opinions?

kai
-- 
~/.signature: No such file or directory

Re: gnus-faq.texi: very old?

[Jesper Harder]

justin@iago.org (Justin Sheehy) writes:

> Jesper Harder <harder@ifa.au.dk> writes:
> 
>> Which newsgroups? I don't think I've ever seen it in gnu.emacs.gnus or
>> any of the other Emacs newsgroups.
> 
> It goes to gnu.emacs.gnus and several others every month.
> 
> The full list of newsgroups it is posted to:
> 
> gnu.emacs.gnus
> gnu.emacs.help
> comp.emacs.xemacs
> comp.emacs
> news.software.readers
> comp.answers
> news.answers

Ah, I think I know why I'm not seeing it -- my newsserver rejects all
posts crossposted to more than four groups.

Re: gnus-faq.texi: very old?

[Justin Sheehy]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) writes:

>> However, if someone feels like texifying the current FAQ, I won't
>> complain one bit.  I've been meaning to update the texi version for,
>> um, a very long time and haven't managed to make myself do it yet.
> 
> Is it goint to be maintained as *.texi from then on?  If *.texi will
> not be the main source format, then it should be generated
> automatically from whatever the main source file format is.

That's a nice idea, but tricky.

Generating the texi from the current canonical source (HTML) is
difficult.  The FAQ has been maintained in HTML form for years.
The generation of the plaintext form that I post to Usenet is trivial
from this.  If someone made it easy to generate texi, I'd do that too.
I'd find a way to do it myself, but I just don't have the time.

The other option is changing the canonical maintained format.  While I
have no objections in theory, there are some aspects of the current
format that I would rather not lose:

 - one file to edit

   Anything that broke the maintained source of the FAQ into multiple
   files would be a pain.

 - both text and HTML are easy

   I have to be able to trivially produce HTML for the web version and
   a text version that is of a suitable format for Usenet posting.
   See my past FAQ posts (or wait for the next one) to see the format
   that I am referring to.

 - simple

   I consider both HTML and plaintext to be simple formats to manage.
   This is assuming that one uses the dead-simple kind of HTML that
   the FAQ is a good example of, of course.  The FAQ is not going to
   accumulate framesets or any interesting web magic at any time for
   as long as I am the maintainer.
   (I've used TeX before, so formats that resemble that don't bother me.)

While texinfo could satisfy these, I must admit that I have always had
a personal aesthetic disgust at the "info" form for documentation.  It
is ugly, and the insistence on it by some things in the GNU world
annoy me.  For instance, there seems to be a powerful attitude of "man
pages are bad, you should use info instead", which just doesn't work
out well in some environments.  This has only increased my
slightly-irrational annoyance at info itself.

That said, if it became trivial for me to generate the HTML and text
formats that I need from the *.texi files, I would certainly consider
switching to that form for the maintainance of the FAQ.

I am open to suggestions.

-Justin

 

Re: gnus-faq.texi: very old?

[Laura Conrad]

>>>>> "Justin" == Justin Sheehy <justin@iago.org> writes:

    Justin> The other option is changing the canonical maintained format. 

    Justin> That said, if it became trivial for me to generate the HTML and text
    Justin> formats that I need from the *.texi files, I would certainly consider
    Justin> switching to that form for the maintainance of the FAQ.

    Justin> I am open to suggestions.

I've had reasonably good success using latex2html on simple documents,
and then something like "lynx -dump" to get the text from the html.
You could get a first approximation of the latex by using the W3 save to latex
option on the html.  

-- 
Laura (mailto:lconrad@laymusic.org , http://www.laymusic.org/ )
(617) 661-8097	fax: (801) 365-6574 
233 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139

Re: gnus-faq.texi: very old?

[Kai Großjohann]

On Thu, 12 Jul 2001, Justin Sheehy wrote:

> That said, if it became trivial for me to generate the HTML and text
> formats that I need from the *.texi files, I would certainly
> consider switching to that form for the maintainance of the FAQ.

Caveat: I like Texinfo as a format, and I also like the Info reader
that comes with Emacs.  It supports searching quite nicely.  So I
might be biased.

Using just one *.texi file is the easiest way to maintain Texinfo
documentation, so the `one file' requirement is fulfilled.

It is easy to create HTML from *.texi (makeinfo --help foo.texi).  If
you want to see what that looks like, you might want to look at the
Tramp manual at the following URL:

http://ls6-www.cs.uni-dortmund.de/~grossjoh/emacs/tramp.html

As you can see, I created just a single HTML file, but it's also
possible to split the result into several HTML files.  For example, by
splitting at every @chapter command.

I'm not quite sure how to generate text from that.  I personally like
the Info format which is nearly text, but I guess you won't like it.
How about converting the HTML into text, then?

And Texinfo is a very simple format.  About the same complexity as
HTML 1.0, I'd say.  Just a few tags, all well documented.  The biggest
problem I've had with it so far is that some of the @-commands expect
their argument in {...} whereas others dislike the braces and just
read to end of line.  But `makeinfo' produces very nice error
messages, so these problems are easy to find.

kai
-- 
~/.signature: No such file or directory

Re: gnus-faq.texi: very old?

[Russ Allbery]

Jesper Harder <harder@ifa.au.dk> writes:

> Ah, I think I know why I'm not seeing it -- my newsserver rejects all
> posts crossposted to more than four groups.

I highly recommend complaining about that and asking them to switch to a
better metric.  There are several that have been worked out over the years
that do just as good of a job of suppressing crossposted junk without
filtering out administrative postings and FAQs.  newsfeeds(5) says:

     G count
         If this flag is specified, an article will only be sent to this
         site if it is posted to no more than count newsgroups.  This has
         the problem of filtering out many FAQs, as well as newsgroup
         creation postings and similar administrative announcements.
         Either the C flag or the U flag is a better solution.

and recommends:

     C count
         If this flag is specified, an article will only be sent to this
         site if the number of groups it is posted to, plus the square of
         the number of groups followups would appear in, is no more than
         count.  "30" is a good value for this flag, allowing crossposts
         to up to 29 groups when followups are set to a single group or
         poster and only allowing crossposts to 5 groups when followups
         aren't set.

There's another, better algorithm that I need to implement in INN at some
point, but C works pretty well.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

Re: gnus-faq.texi: very old?

[Jesper Harder]

rra@stanford.edu (Russ Allbery) writes:

> Jesper Harder <harder@ifa.au.dk> writes:
> 
>> Ah, I think I know why I'm not seeing it -- my newsserver rejects all
>> posts crossposted to more than four groups.
> 
> I highly recommend complaining about that and asking them to switch to a
> better metric.

Yeah, I've already complained a couple of times, but it always seems to
go to the bottom of the TODO-list :-(

The filter is especially annoying in a group like
news.announce.newgroups, where I'm missing quite a few RFD's and CFV's.

Re: gnus-faq.texi: very old?

[Karl Eichwalder]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> I'm not quite sure how to generate text from that.  I personally like
> the Info format which is nearly text, but I guess you won't like it.

Basically, 'makeinfo --no-warn --no-headers --output faq.txt faq.texi'
will do it.  Try --help for more info :)

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