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

[Simon Tournier <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>]

Hi,

On Sun, 15 Dec 2024 at 22:34, Jeremy Bryant <jb@jeremybryant.net> wrote:

> 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?
>
> 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.

Some Info manuals which are not part of any software are distributed by
Guix; for example see the Guix package ’gnu-standards’.

Well, I think you are asking two questions. (1) Can Guix distribute
Texinfo manuals using another format as HTML?  Well, since ’makeinfo’
supports(*) HTML output, the answer seems yes. :-) Something under
share/html in addition to share/info; perhaps.

(2) Can we package any Texinfo manual and distribute it?  Yes.  Although
maybe it would require a dedicated build system in order to avoid each
time the same sequence of ’invoke’.

Cheers,
simon


(*) makeinfo --html: maybe we need to check if the Guix package of
    texinfo is correctly configured to output HTML.