Re: INFO on add-ons

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

>>>>> "David" == David A Cobb <superbiskit@cox.net> writes:

    David> I have no concept of anyone coercing a contributer in any
    David> regard - it'll cost you at least $30.00/hr to coerce /me/.

Oh, I think requiring revision of a patch because it has sucky
docstrings is both reasonable and coercive, and I doubt you would send
me a bill.  More like, "good grief, how could _I_ forget that!"  :-)

    David> But it would be a considerable good if they did contribute
    David> Info pages

Sure.  But we can't require Info pages, especially as rms has
pronounced against it.  Note that GNU is much more strict about
requiring docs when they are judged necessary than XEmacs.

    David> and if installing the software also installed the info.

It does:

bash$ fgrep .info /usr/lib/xemacs/xemacs-packages/pkginfo/MANIFEST.* | wc
    165     165   13072
bash$ fgrep -l info /usr/lib/xemacs/xemacs-packages/pkginfo/MANIFEST.* | wc
     42      42    2602
165 .info files in 42 (of 94) packages (and that omits Mule packages
and the core).  Yes, it's a shame that Swiss cheese has holes, but the
part that isn't holes is pretty tasty, no?

None of this is to deny that your perception of some problem is
unjustified.  But it's not obvious to me that either XEmacs or the
upstream maintainers are falling down on the job here.

    David> My notion was more an encouraging word in the documents we
    David> publish to guide the potential contributer.

There are plenty of those.  See standards.info, for example.  We could
probably strengthen them.  However, getting contributors to read those
is like getting users to read NEWS or the FAQ.

It's much more effective, and generally not taken too badly, for
reviewers to use moral suasion and the occasional veto.

    David> I think a script to take the bugs out of installing is a
    David> positive good thing.

Given your explanation of the points I didn't understand, I think (for
XEmacs usage) everything you want is satisfied by (1) writing more
Texinfo docs and (2) making more XEmacs packages.  We already do all
the installation and set up that you want.  If there are instances
where either the core code or an XEmacs package fails to install
existing docs, that is a bug and I would appreciate a report.

For (1), see my other post on "Extreme Documentation."

The main place that (2) falls down is that XEmacs packages don't much
care if their installation is useful to GNU Emacs or standalone Info
readers.  But setting INFOPATH=/path/to/xemacs-packages/info:$INFOPATH
should do the trick (modulo our interpretation of dir as a cache
rather than something that should be authoritative).


-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
 My nostalgia for Icon makes me forget about any of the bad things.  I don't
have much nostalgia for Perl, so its faults I remember.  Scott Gilbert c.l.py