Re: On being web-friendly and why info must die

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

David Engster <deng@randomsample.de> writes:

> Paul Eggert writes:
>> On 12/07/2014 06:30 PM, Stefan Monnier wrote:
>>> I think I understand why they don't want to fix the processing speed.
>>> But we should still push them to provide workarounds.  "Separate
>>> compilation" would solve this problem
>>
>> It might, yes.  But that sounds like more work than switching input
>> formats would be, if some other input format already has good support
>> for most of what we want.
>>
>>> Indeed the slowdown (factor 100 IIRC last time I measured it) is
>>> a serious problem.
>>
>> Absolutely.  Texinfo's performance is a real turnoff for me, and it
>> can't be encouraging potential contributors.
>
>  ~/git-2.2.0/Documentation> time asciidoc -b html user-manual.txt
>  asciidoc -b html user-manual.txt  7.26s user 0.02s system 90% cpu 8.068 total
>
> That's for 4.5k lines.
>
>  ~/emacs/doc/misc> time makeinfo --html gnus.texi
>  makeinfo --html gnus.texi  2.00s user 0.04s system 85% cpu 2.385 total
>
> That's for 30k lines. Yes, that's texinfo4, of course, but I hear it
> still compiles.
>
> I doubt we will be happy with anything that's considerably slower than
> texinfo4, which means that whatever we might switch to, it better be
> written in something that's fast. That already rules out asciidoc and
> Org.

I don't actually see the big deal in compilation times for a full
compilation.  It's not like one does it all the time.  If we are talking
about proofreading, then it might be worth investigating how we can get
partial compilation better to work in Texinfo editing modes.

-- 
David Kastrup