Re: Using Git to manage your Emacs changes

[Georg Brandl <g.brandl@gmx.net>]

Am 24.04.2010 21:33, schrieb Jason Earl:

>>    Does it really matter that much?  I am certain that their are other
>>    parts of the GNU system (like, perhaps, TeX), where the hackers in
>>    question don't follow GNU policies.  In fact, Bazaar doesn't
>>    completely follow GNU policies (no texinfo documentation, and no
>>    real plans to generate it either).
>>
>> While TeX is part of the GNU system, it is not part of the GNU
>> project.  I hope that bazaar will adpot texinfo manuals soon, I think
>> someone was working on that.
> 
> Bazaar has this marked as a bug (wishlist), but they are essentially
> waiting for someone to come up with a way to make texinfo documentation
> from their existing rst documentation.  In fact, it could easily be
> argued that they are moving farther away from texinfo as they have moved
> from simply requiring docutils to requiring the more complicated sphinx
> documentation build system.

As the Sphinx maintainer and at the same time avid Emacs user, I feel I have
to chime in here.

I wouldn't say that using Sphinx is moving farther away from texinfo.  As
far as I know, there is no docutils writer for texinfo right now.
Most of the work of supporting Texinfo as a Sphinx output format would be
required for docutils as well, i.e. the conversion from a node tree to
Texinfo markup.

Additional overhead is only necessary for Sphinx' custom nodes, and for
determining how to interpret cross-references and how to map the multi-file
structure of a Sphinx project to the output.  This is simply stuff that
isn't supported by "plain" docutils but has to be supported by Texinfo,
so the mapping shouldn't be hard.

> On the bright side, if someone could modify Sphinx to generate texinfo
> then I would get my Python documentation back in texinfo format as well.

I'm absolutely not opposed to supporting Texinfo.  Anyone who wants to take
this on will have my support, but as with many feature requests, I do not
have the time to do it myself.

Georg

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