Re: Org mode and Emacs

[Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@posteo.net>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> > Not the output format, but the language: new directives and sometimes
>> > markup are added with every release of Texinfo.  Just read their NEWS
>> > file.
>> 
>> The way I see Org markup extension would make it easy to users add new
>> custom markup, as needed. Then, no frequent changes to the base markup
>> will be necessary to accommodate for less common use cases.
>
> You missed the "new directives" part.  I do recommend reading their
> NEWS to get the idea of the rate at which new features are added to
> Texinfo.

There is a single word "directives" in
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/texinfo.git/plain/NEWS:

    . #line directives are recognized.

>> In other words, I do not see why Org should support every single Texinfo
>> markup. We just need to provide enough support to be on par in terms of
>> the needs of manual authors.
>
> GNU Manuals use a large portion of what Texinfo provides, and limiting
> what they could use when they write in Org would mean some Texinfo
> features cannot be used that way, which is a disadvantage.  People
> will have to think twice before they switch to Org, because at some
> point they might want to use a feature you decided not to support.

I understand. However, new features are added to Texinfo for a reason.
If the same reason is valid for Org, equivalent features may be added.
Similarly, we may add features to Org that have no equivalent in
Texinfo. So, this is a normal development process with new features
being proposed, discussed, and maybe added.

From my point of view, equivalence with Texinfo is not something we care
as much about yet. It is just a general direction we can use for Org
development. I deem it useful even if we cannot reach all the Texinfo
features at the end. But if we can, we can _later_ see further about how
we want to incorporate (or not) new Texinfo features.

>> > That was for Org-to-Texinfo conversion.  Here we are talking about
>> > Org-to-Info, which is much more work.
>> 
>> Why so?
>
> Because the production rules are much more complex.  I suggest to take
> a look at the Perl source code of texi2any to see what it entails.

AFAIU, the conversion is done in
/usr/share/texinfo/Texinfo/Convert/Info.pm
I do not see anything extraordinary. Org uses similar approach - working
with parse tree.

-- 
Ihor Radchenko // yantar92,
Org mode contributor,
Learn more about Org mode at <https://orgmode.org/>.
Support Org development at <https://liberapay.com/org-mode>,
or support my work at <https://liberapay.com/yantar92>