Hi Werner, Werner LEMBERG wrote on Mon, Feb 17, 2020 at 12:21:43AM +0100:
>> And at this point, the man(7) language is better maintained and >> appears to have more of a future than texinfo, which has been a lame >> duck now for at least half a decade, probably longer: > Uh, oh, no idea why you bash texinfo from time to time. Oops, sorry, i didn't intend to start a flame war; the main reason for posting was that i think considering info(1) the modern replacement for man(1) and hence texinfo(5) for man(7) seems doubtful, and part of what the OP wrote felt as if he implicitly came from that assumption. In particular, i didn't intend to discuss the command line UI; that's rather distinct from the markup language and not so much what the OP probably had in mind, given that he mostly wanted to create PDF output. > Currently, it receives more active development than groff - or man(7); > have a look at > > http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/texinfo.git Indeed, it has consistently between 200 and 900 commits per year in every year since 2002. Groff tends to get 50 to 500, mandoc 100 to 400, so the sum of groff and mandoc is of about the same order as texinfo, and only a fraction of that is about man(7), so i was wrong about that point. I *thought* i had looked it up at some point in the past, but it appears i made a mistake when looking it up or when remembering the result. > Almost all GNU programs still provide its documentation in the texinfo > format; I don't see that this will change in the near future. [...] > This AsciiDoc thing never happened Well, my personal impression is that texinfo(5) is likely better than AsciiDoc, so i wouldn't necessarily consider it a bad thing if that's not the direction that is taken. I mainly read that statement by esr/rms as an indication that the GNU project intended to give up on texinfo; interesting to hear that no longer seems likely to you right now. So i should probably be more careful about what i say about texinfo in the future: neither dead nor moribund, it seems. Yours, Ingo
