Re: Emacs documentation. Was My emacs was upgraded and I am a novice again

[David Kastrup]

"Dave Pawson" <dave.pawson@gmail.com> writes:

> On 23/09/2007, Bastien <bzg@altern.org> wrote:
>> "Dave Pawson" <dave.pawson@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>> > My offer is to convert the emacs documentation into docbook, version 5
>> > and work with those interested to improve it/bring it up to scratch.
>>
>> It would be like trying to convert man pages into docbook. Why?
>
> Because XML is more flexible and a more modern standard for
> documentation IMHO.

If I break my arm it is also more flexible.  The question is what
tanglible, user-visible benefit you expect to be coming from the
purported added flexibility.  We don't have the developer power to
chase after every "modern standard".  If we did, we would have had to
convert the whole GNU documentation from Texinfo to HTML to SGML to
Linuxdoc to XML/Docbook by now, without tangible benefit of any such
change.

You are proposing to have a lot of work done in order to be more
buzzword compliant.  Unless you come up with some very good _visible_
benefits, you will be rather alone with that work.  And then you still
face the challenge of convincing people they should change to your
version when you are done.

>> I guess too many developpers actually use Texinfo to document their
>> code, and both users and developpers seem to be happy with that.
>
> You may be right. I think it is worth challenging though, otherwise
> we'll never progress?

Progress without aim is just activism.  You need to balance benefits
and efforts.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum