Re: Improve access to documentation in Info format

[Suhail Singh <suhailsingh247@gmail.com>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>   > Agreed, natural markup may not be a substitute for Texinfo.  And yet,
>   > there may still be utility in providing _best effort_ but "visibly
>   > wrong" Info manuals for packages that use other documentation generation
>   > systems (for instance, Sphinx).
>
> I agree -- and isn't this what they do now?

It depends on who you mean by "they".

If by "they" you mean packagers, then no that is not what generally
happens.  If by "they" you mean users who are interested in perusing
documentation in Info format, then they _could_ do so, but that misses
the "value" I was alluding to - which was about making something which
is possible today, convenient (as opposed to making something that's not
possible today, possible).

However, going back to our exchange from a few responses before, if we
make progress on [1] then the above (access to Info manuals generated by
translating-from-other-formats) would also improve over time.

[1]: Providing an "easy" way for users to see available info manuals and
     install them.

You suggested:

> The way I see is involves two steps:
>
> a, Set up some sort of download repo with all the Info manuals.

A candidate for this could be an ELPA repository (say, NonGNU ELPA).
Alternatively, this could be the main Guix channel (or another Guix
channel).

Of these the easiest (from an Emacs user's perspective) would be an ELPA
repository.  Note that having these be collected in an ELPA archive
wouldn't preclude them also being packaged in Guix (as happens today
with various Emacs packages available on various ELPA repositories).

Packages from NonGNU ELPA are easily available for users to install in
recent versions of Emacs.  Further, since NonGNU ELPA doesn't seek
copyright assignment from packages, it is more suited to the goal at
hand.

Are there reasons why NonGNU ELPA wouldn't be a good place to host such
Info manuals?

> b. Write software to find the desired manual, fetch it, and install it
> on your computer.

If the Info manuals were hosted on NonGNU ELPA, then package.el already
provides this.

> Would people like tp vplunteer to work on this?

To this end, would it be sufficient if people volunteered packages (that
provide Info manuals) to NonGNU ELPA?

-- 
Suhail