Re: Emacs, oldsters, newbiness

[Alex <kensanata@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 5:25 PM, Xavier Maillard <xma@gnu.org> wrote:
>    EmacsWiki ----> Online emacs documentation portal ----> Emacs Info
>
> I pretty like this idea. We would have to get tag support in
> emacswiki to ease information retrieval process. I hope we could
> make this happen with the help of the emacswiki community.

Tag support could be added to the wiki. I think a "forward index"
would be even better, though. Currently our category pages work as
such. They work just like menu pages for texinfo, and therefore it
would be easy to translate a subset of pages into a texinfo fragment.

In fact, many years ago, I had a script that translated the entire
Emacs Wiki into a texinfo document. Eventually, however, I decided
that it wasn't worth the effort to maintain. If you think otherwise,
we could resurrect that piece of code.

Part of the problem is that the code needs to write a wiki to texinfo
rule for every wiki to HTML rule it has, and the wiki engine used
allows users to plug in an unlimited amount of new rules.  Before
doing all that work, I would therefore like to get a pretty good idea
of how useful this effort is. How would integration into Emacs itself
work? What does emacs-devel say to this? Who will be responsible for
maintenance? Who will act as a filter? Perhaps we'll have to introduce
more tags to indicate which pages not to include (eg.
CategoryHomepage?). Who will decided how to deal with images, how
about mixed licenses of the resulting product (most text pages are
FDL, most code pages are GPL), and so on. I'd love to see these
organisational issues answered before writing any actual code.

Also, I'll be checking my email rarely these days as I'm travelling in
Costa Rica. ;)