Re: man Macro Package and pdfmark

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Werner,

Werner LEMBERG wrote on Mon, Feb 17, 2020 at 12:21:43AM +0100:

>> And at this point, the man(7) language is better maintained and
>> appears to have more of a future than texinfo, which has been a lame
>> duck now for at least half a decade, probably longer:

> Uh, oh, no idea why you bash texinfo from time to time.

Oops, sorry, i didn't intend to start a flame war; the main reason
for posting was that i think considering info(1) the modern replacement
for man(1) and hence texinfo(5) for man(7) seems doubtful, and part
of what the OP wrote felt as if he implicitly came from that assumption.

In particular, i didn't intend to discuss the command line UI;
that's rather distinct from the markup language and not so much
what the OP probably had in mind, given that he mostly wanted to
create PDF output.

> Currently, it receives more active development than groff - or man(7);
> have a look at
> 
>   http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/texinfo.git

Indeed, it has consistently between 200 and 900 commits per year
in every year since 2002.  Groff tends to get 50 to 500, mandoc 100
to 400, so the sum of groff and mandoc is of about the same order
as texinfo, and only a fraction of that is about man(7), so i was
wrong about that point.  I *thought* i had looked it up at some
point in the past, but it appears i made a mistake when looking it
up or when remembering the result.

> Almost all GNU programs still provide its documentation in the texinfo
> format; I don't see that this will change in the near future.
[...]
> This AsciiDoc thing never happened

Well, my personal impression is that texinfo(5) is likely better
than AsciiDoc, so i wouldn't necessarily consider it a bad thing
if that's not the direction that is taken.  I mainly read that
statement by esr/rms as an indication that the GNU project intended
to give up on texinfo; interesting to hear that no longer seems
likely to you right now.  So i should probably be more careful about
what i say about texinfo in the future: neither dead nor moribund,
it seems.

Yours,
  Ingo