From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.emacs.gnus.general/36884 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Justin Sheehy Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.gnus.general Subject: Re: gnus-faq.texi: very old? Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2001 12:12:40 -0400 Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: coloc-standby.netfonds.no Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: main.gmane.org 1035172395 10947 80.91.224.250 (21 Oct 2002 03:53:15 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 03:53:15 +0000 (UTC) Cc: ding@gnus.org Return-Path: Return-Path: Original-Received: (qmail 7684 invoked from network); 12 Jul 2001 16:12:36 -0000 Original-Received: from ra.iago.org (192.148.252.45) by gnus.org with SMTP; 12 Jul 2001 16:12:36 -0000 Original-Received: from ra.iago.org.iago.org (ra.iago.org [192.148.252.45]) by ra.iago.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C6D702C1AD; Thu, 12 Jul 2001 12:12:40 -0400 (EDT) Original-To: Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai =?iso-8859-1?q?Gro=DFjohann?=) In-Reply-To: (Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE's message of "Thu, 12 Jul 2001 13:17:23 +0200") User-Agent: Gnus/5.090004 (Oort Gnus v0.04) XEmacs/21.4 (Academic Rigor) Original-Lines: 60 Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.gnus.general:36884 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.gnus.general:36884 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