Texinfo reputation (was: Re: [External] : Re: Proposal: Include C Manual from RMS in Emacs git, and/or release)

[Max Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com>]

On 01/12/2024 13:15, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> My evidence is that when people report problems with GNU manuals, they
> almost always show a URL of the HTML documentation.

I would include an http(s): link into an issue report to avoid ugly 
multistep style of addressing info nodes as in

> emacs --help
[...]
> Run M-x info RET m emacs RET m emacs invocation RET inside Emacs to
> read the main documentation for these command-line arguments.

and to allow people reading the message from a mobile device to easily 
inspect the actual text. That is why I consider URLs in reports as a 
weak evidence. Side note: likely I would duplicate the reference as 
(info "(emacs) Emacs Invocation").

My impression based on debian-user mailing list messages is that people 
avoid info manuals due to inconvenience of the standalone reader. They 
have some workarounds for cases when length of a man page is excessively 
high for comfortable reading. An example is PDF generated from BASH man 
page despite BASH has the manual in the texinfo format.

Those who read .info documents may recommend e.g. pinfo. From my point 
of view, tkinfo is usually better than "info".

Another issue is that there is no standard way to share a link to a 
specific node of a texinfo document. khelpcenter and yelp use different 
URL schemes for this purpose. It may not be easy to get link to the 
currently displayed node and that style of links would not be helpful 
for Emacs or standalone info browsers.

Debian 12 bookworm: "emacs -f info-standalone" option is not included into

update-alternatives --list infobrowser
/usr/bin/info
/usr/bin/tkinfo

Feel free to forward this message to a texinfo mailing list. Another 
reason why I have decided to post it here is the following message:

On 30/11/2024 21:12, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> Texinfo comes with info-stnd.info,
> which documents the stand-alone reader, which is part of Texinfo.
> 
> So I don't see how that move could damage the reputation of Texinfo.
> 
> Do you have any information to suggest that many people use the
> stand-alone reader?