Re: python doc available in emacs info format?

[Xah Lee <xahlee@gmail.com>]

> Please do not slag off a project if you want people to help;
> it tends to put the goat up.

a healthy community needs both positive comment as well as negative to
grow.

emacs's user base has been rotting off from i estimate more than 50%
of programers to less that 1% today.

the particular observation about info doc in this thread is a specific
example.

You can help FSF and emacs to improve, by, for example, trying to help
it to evolve with the rapidly changing computing industry, In this
case, document formats, provided if you see some of my points as
valid. Or, at least consider this eroding awareness of the gnu info
format among average programers worth discussing. No disrespect to
you, but dismissing it as “troll” or similiar sentiment is not
helpful.

emacs community is too much cult and pride. FSF and its product the
GNU was highly successful in the 1980 and 1990s, with its gcc, emacs,
and slew of gnu version of unix tools. A significant part of the
reason is because these products at the time is truely better products
in comparison to existing ones, that there are almost no substitute.
Today, for many variety and complexity of reasons, almost none of this
is true, except possiblly a few such as gcc and GPG. The unix shells
ways and sed, awk, etc tools has largely been replaced by perl,
python, ruby etc, partly due to the changing nature of computing. For
GCC itself, and make, yacc, bison etc there are tens of competiting
products either commercial or open source. Then there's Java, with its
entire suite of tools and libs, and there are tens of truely quality
languages out there today other then the ones that GCC can handle.

emacs 23, although is fantastic to us emacs fans, but if you look
carefully at its feature list, most of it is widely in commericial
software about 10 years ago.

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄


On Aug 17, 4:32 am, "Colin S. Miller" <no-spam-
thank-...@csmiller.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> Xah Lee wrote:
> > btw, is there still info format for python doc?
>
> > i feel kinda sad that emacs info format has pretty much been
> > deprecated over the past decade. About a decade ago, you still will
> > see now and then people asking for emacs info format of docs (was the
> > days of perl). Today, one don't hear of it.
>
> > Part of this is due to emacs cult problem. See:
>
> Xah,
>
> Please do not slag off a project if you want people to help;
> it tends to put the goat up.
>
> It is not "Emacs Info" format, it is FSF Info format.
> There is a stand-alone program to read the Info documentation.
> The program is called "info".
>
> Ubuntu maintains a package search site, it is onhttp://packages.ubuntu.com/
>
> However, there seems to be no files named
> python.*info   (regexp)
>
> There is a
> python-docutils package
> which does contain information in several
> other formats.
>
> This package can be found either via the above site
> or using "apt-cache search python-doc".
>
> As "info" is a FSF format, all FSF produced programs
> will provide documentation in this format. However Python
> is not under the auspices of the FSF, so does not need to use
> this format.
>
> BTW,
> HTML versions of INFO documentation can be generated by
> info2html or info_to_html on them, or texi2html on the source.
>
> Have a nice day,
> Colin S. Miller