Re: Docs on ELPA (was Re: Adding Flycheck to NonGNU ELPA)

[Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net>]

Spencer Baugh <sbaugh@janestreet.com> writes:

> "Bozhidar Batsov" <bozhidar@batsov.dev> writes:
>> Thanks for the updates!
>>
>> Regarding the docs - I was thinking of converting them to something like AsciiDoc or org-mode, but that'd require me to find a new
>> way to host them as ReadTheDocs supports only RST and Markdown. That's why I've put this item on the backburner for now. I try
>> to find some time to look into the various conversion option (or generating TexInfo from the current docs). 
>
> Hm, maybe the web interface for GNU and NonGNU ELPA should support
> hosting web-rendered Texinfo manuals?  That would make it easier to
> evaluate packages without installing them, and also solve Flycheck's
> documentation hosting issue.

It does, e.g. Compat directs directly to elpa.gnu.org:
https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/doc/compat/compat.html

> Since this would require ELPA to build the Texinfo manuals, 

It just renders them in HTML, I don't know of any .info files being
available outside of the tarballs.

>                                                             
>                                                             perhaps we
> could also use this to make a package-view-docs command (or something)
> in Emacs which will fetch and view the manual for a package that is not
> yet installed.

Something similar I had in mind was a variation on package-install that
wouldn't persist the installation, and instead of extracting the files
into .../elpa/, would store them in a /tmp/ sub-directory.  That would
go further than what you are describing, but would make trying out a
package easier.