Re: Guile in Emacs

[Jeff Clough <jeff@chaosphere.com>]

"Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:

>> It is not okay for critical documentation to be hosted
>> anywhere but a user's hard drive,
> 
> You've added "critical" now, but your previous argument was against all, not
> just "critical", non-local reference.

Sigh.  I'm not adding requirements, *you* are being pedantic.

> Which user? What size hard drive? Will you tailor the available doc set by
> design to Emacs running on a 1 gig flash drive or other lowest common
> denominator?

I'll just point at what Emacs is doing today and say "Pretty much that".

> Nowadays, the number of people who actually download PDF docs for a large
> software product, in order to have them locally, is miniscule, compared to the
> number who consult the same doc set on demand, on line (Web) as HTML.

And a growing number of people are using netbooks with dodgy wi-fi
connections.

There is a general philosophical debate showing up in various places as
to whether it is okay to assume the presence of the network when the
user is not doing non network-specific things.  Apparently you feel the
answer is yes.

> But that doesn't mean that the entire doc set for Emacs (or anything else) needs
> to be or should be kept to a minimal size that every user could store on a
> typical hard disk.

My info directory is 14 megabytes.  Even if the new version required
this to increase by a full order of magnitude in order to be "complete",
I fail to see how this is in any way a limitation.

> A hard-and-simple hard-disk criterion such as you express is not appropriate.
> Doc that is not needed by users is wasted and should be pruned. But if some
> particular doc is needed to explain something, then it's needed, period.

Again, I'm going to point to what Emacs has today and say "See, that?
We should do that."

You disagree, fair enough.

Jeff