Re: emacs-Xtra

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Nick Roberts <nickrob@snap.net.nz>
> Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2006 09:41:18 +1200
> 
> I think emacs-Xtra is becoming a bit of a dog's breakfast

I tend to agree.

> (possibly an ms-dog's breakfast!).

I don't understand this part, especially since most of the MS-DOS info
is still in an appendix to the main manual.

> If I want to find something out about VC, I don't want
> to have to search through *two* manuals to find it because I can't guess
> where the arbitrary split has been made.
> 
> I think the all the documentation for VC should be in one manual.

I agree.  And the same goes for Calendar.

On top of that, whoever split portions of msdog.texi into emacs-xtra,
managed to remove from the main manual important information about
setting up printing on Windows.

> I have two suggestions:
> 
> 1) VC has its own manual like PCL-CVS does.
> 
> 2) All the programming/development topics are moved to a separate manual
>    (Emacs IDE?) and only the obscure stuff is left in emacs-Xtra.

I have a 3rd suggestion (which I think I already made in the past):

  3) Have those ``extra'' sections be part of the on-line manual, but
     not of the printed manual.  In the printed manual, replace the
     extra sections with an xref to the extra manual.  The Texinfo
     @ifinfo facility should do the trick.

This should be a good solution to the original problem, which is that
the FSF wants the printed manuals it sells to not be too large.