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

[Divya Ranjan <divya@subvertising.org>]

Hello, Jeremy,
Jeremy Bryant <jb@jeremybryant.net> writes:

> Hi Guix developers,
>
> The GNU Project's documentation format is Texinfo.
> How about distributing some or many Texinfo manuals through Guix, is
> this something that is consistent with previous norms in Guix?

I believe this is certainly feasible, and desirable. Since Guix itself relies a lot on functioning with info for its documentation requirements.

> Following a discussion on emacs-devel, several people suggested that
> GNU Guix may be a a good way to contemplate this distribution mechanism,
> for obvious GNU-related reasons.
>
> We discussed both a comprehensive solution for Info manuals, as well as
> specific cases such as RMS's C manual (c.info) which is not part of a
> software project.

As Maxim noted, the particular manual already exists. But we need to think about how exactly to package the Info manuals. Since Guix’s process of packaging is a bit differently organized, we’d have to figure out where exactly should the package definitions for these manuals live in the Guix source tree. I see that the C manual is in gnu/packages/c.scm and SICP in gnu/packages/scheme.scm, so maybe each manual could go into the relevant program/language’s guile module. Or, should we have a module just for the Info manuals? I see gnu/packages/texinfo.scm and it has mostly a few packages related to TeXinfo readers, could we put them there, or only the miscellaneous ones?

Those more knowledgeable about Guix’s source-tree management should shed light on this.

Regards,
-- 
Divya Ranjan,
Philosophy, Mathematics, Libre Software.