Hi Eric, > Where we're probably going is that (a) info will die, to be replaced > by HTML browsed from within Emacs, and (b) Texinfo will be replaced by > a modern lightweight format that can render to both print and HTML; > most likely asciidoc.
Important though a lightweight input format is, a lightweight set of tools for rendering it in the comman output formats is also needed. >From others' comments it appears asciidoc doesn't give that at the moment. This still leaves the irony that groff's documentation is written in non-groff, lessening contributions from the audience. > While this won't directly solve the stub problem, it will at least > break the full documentation for GNU projects out of the ghetto they > have been living in onto the Web. Hasn't the info documentation been on the web for a long time? https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/html_node/index.html > The functional win here is not so much HTML's display capabilities as > the fact that everything will be living in the same URLspace. Do you mean the same schema, i.e. http, or that info and man don't have well-defined schemas of their own? > Because the man-page stubs were a kludge to get around the > complications of browsing info outside of Emacs I don't think that's why they existed? One could always avoid Emacs with info(1), or pinfo(1), etc. And avoid them with info groff | less +Gg They were a Debian policy because they rightly thought everything should have a man page, and a proper one at that. "Do not close the bug report until a proper man page is available" -- http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-docs.html. The "stubs" are because writing documentation is boring for volunteers that didn't write the code. Cheers, Ralph.
