Re: Bug tracker for skribilo

[Arun Isaac]

Hi Ludo,

> Agreed!  You can come on IRC if that’s your thing.

I usually stay away from IRC since I find instant messaging too
distracting. But then, I should probably not be complaining of
loneliness! ;-)

> Anyhow, I think we should organize hackathon to make progress on
> specific topics like this one, especially when there are rather
> well-defined tasks people could work on, as is the case here thanks to
> your talk.

Yep! jgart and the whereiseveryone community are already doing a good
job organizing Guix meetups. We should probably organize "official"
meetups.

> Yes… it’s complicated.  So far, I’d be tempting to keep Texinfo source
> for the Guix manual, notably because ‘makeinfo’ is more robust overall:
> the Info and PDF output we get is an order of magnitude better than what
> Skribilo currently gives.  But Skribilo can be improved, of course.

I agree, I didn't like Skribilo's info output very much. But, we will
improve it in time for sure.

> What I’d like to have is a Texinfo reader in Skribilo: Guile already
> comes with a Texinfo -> stexi (similar to SXML) parser, so the reader in
> Skribilo would be quite small.  The parser in Guile proper needs love
> though: it’s good but not good enough to handle complete real-life
> manuals, I think.
>
> Longer-term, we could also look at the Scribble syntax: unlike
> Skribe/Skribilo, it’s text-first.  What if Texinfo became our own
> Scribble-like syntax?  We’d extend Texinfo syntax with escapes that
> would let us use custom markup or introduce Scheme code in documents.

Normally, I'd have thought integrating Texinfo is too much work! ;-)
But, it's probably the best way to migrate existing manuals such as the
Guix manual into skribilo. So, we'll get there at some point! If anyone
reading is interested in hacking on this, contributions are welcome! :-)

Regards,
Arun