Texinfo, Free Beer

Texinfo, Free Beer

[jgart]

Hi Guixers,

wdyt of having some modern TLDR entry in the cookbook for getting Guix neophytes up to par with texinfo?

Since texinfo is the defacto markup for the GNU Guix project and we're not likely to change it any time soon, 
I was think we could have some distilled/TLDR docs for users who mostly write and consume markdown.

I was thinking something along the lines of what chicken has for rubyists or pythonistas:

https://wiki.call-cc.org/chicken-for-ruby-programmers
https://wiki.call-cc.org/chicken-for-python-programmers

"Texinfo for MDs"

roptat started a TLDR Texinfo guide on the learnxinyminutes series*.

Should we just improve on roptat's guide and link it in a Guix doc somewhere so
that it is more discoverable or integrate/fork it or similar into our docs?

Same way we have a Scheme crash course, we can have a Texinfo crash course?

It would be worth it since Texinfo seems more complex than Scheme from
a syntactic perspective and our new documentation contributors could
benefit from a crash course in Texinfo.

I think the GNU docs for texinfo are TMI for a new user just wanting to write some Guix docs for great good.

Another option could be to integrate guile-commonmark** into Guix so that
we could support markdown in addition to Texinfo? Please don't boo and
throw free beer at the stage.

Nix used to mostly have their docs in docbook but now they support
markdown and their users are much happier***

--
jgart

* https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/texinfo/
** https://github.com/OrangeShark/guile-commonmark
*** https://invidious.osi.kr/watch?v=WwgSMgpX6TM

Re: Texinfo, Free Beer

[Ekaitz Zarraga]

Hi,

------- Original Message -------
On Saturday, August 6th, 2022 at 3:30 PM, jgart <jgart@dismail.de> wrote:


> Hi Guixers,
>
> wdyt of having some modern TLDR entry in the cookbook for getting Guix neophytes up to par with texinfo?
>
> Since texinfo is the defacto markup for the GNU Guix project and we're not likely to change it any time soon,
> I was think we could have some distilled/TLDR docs for users who mostly write and consume markdown.
>
> I was thinking something along the lines of what chicken has for rubyists or pythonistas:
>
> https://wiki.call-cc.org/chicken-for-ruby-programmers
> https://wiki.call-cc.org/chicken-for-python-programmers
>
> "Texinfo for MDs"
>
> roptat started a TLDR Texinfo guide on the learnxinyminutes series*.
>
> Should we just improve on roptat's guide and link it in a Guix doc somewhere so
> that it is more discoverable or integrate/fork it or similar into our docs?
>
> Same way we have a Scheme crash course, we can have a Texinfo crash course?


I could use that!

Re: Texinfo, Free Beer

[pinoaffe]

Hi!

jgart <jgart@dismail.de> writes:
> wdyt of having some modern TLDR entry in the cookbook for getting Guix neophytes up to par with texinfo?

That sounds really useful!

Especially if it also explains guix conventions as to how certain
inforation is represented in texinfo.

So far, whenever I wrote texinfo, I'd do so purely by mimicry of
surrounding documentation, and that's rather sub-optimal.

Kind regards,
pinoaffe

Re: Texinfo, Free Beer

[jgart]

On Tue, 09 Aug 2022 11:22:02 +0200 pinoaffe <pinoaffe@airmail.cc> wrote:
> So far, whenever I wrote texinfo, I'd do so purely by mimicry of
> surrounding documentation, and that's rather sub-optimal.

Likewise, that's been my approach too mostly.