Re: gnus-faq.texi: very old?

[Justin Sheehy <justin@iago.org>]

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