Re: GNU Manuals in Info/HTML format via Guix?

[Divya Ranjan <divya@subvertising.org>]

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Greetings for a New Year, Richard,

> The task here is to distribute Info manuals in a few platform-independent non-source forms, perhaps Info and HTML. Perhaps PDF files too. That is so much simpler than what Guix has to do that using Guix for this would be a quick and dirty hack.

Indeed, I agree with you here. Though, a special aspect of Guix is that it is _both_ and independent GNU/Linux distribution, and a package manager that can be hosted on any foreign GNU/Linux distribution whether Debian or Trisquel.

That said, the problem here is that distributing the manuals through Guix now limits them to users of Guix (package manager and distribution). And that is not what we want, the manuals should be distributed so that anyone can have them regardless of which distribution they use.

> The task here can be done with something much simpler, and if we
decide to do it, writing a clean solution won't take very long. And it will be simpler to understand than Guix.

I agree it would be simpler than installing and learning Guix, but can you hint at what such a solution might look like? Manuals are usually distributed as packages, and package management of most (Guix is an exception) GNU/Linux distributions is painfully isolated and idiosyncratic to the particular system.

Can we create a single repository containing all of the manuals, which then acts as the main source from which all GNU/Linux distributions can fetch and update?

I believe the construction of a system to _manage_ such manuals is relatively much simple, but it is the distribution that I'm afraid would be complicated.

Regards,
Divya Ranjan, Mathematics, Philosophy and Libre Software

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