Re: Broken link at http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/

[Patrice Dumas]

On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 04:04:15PM -0500, Karl Berry wrote:
> 
> Thanks for the details.  Yeah, texi2html offers many features that
> makeinfo --html does not.  That is what is depressing, coupled with the
> sad fact that I have not been able to develop comparable features for
> makeinfo. 

I think that you are over-pessimistic. The html proposed by makeinfo
--html is quite nice now, and few manuals use texi2html. The only real
selling point of texi2html nowadays is the possibility to customize
completly the output. But if texi2html didn't exist, I don't think
the cost to do it would be worth it now that makeinfo output is nice.
Or to put is differently, it is possible that I wouldn't have engaged in 
the rewrite I did of the texinfo processing of texi2html in 2003 if
the improvement in html from texinfo 4.7 (released in 2004) had been
there at that time. Since it exists it makes sense to maintain it, but 
the gap is very thin now in my opinion.

> I admire Patrice and crew for their work on texi2html, and
> they have contributed a lot to Texinfo, but it's just sad to have this
> kind of semi-duplicated effort, especially when GNU packages use the
> (non-GNU) texi2html.  Not that I blame you, not at all.
> 
> Maybe one day it will get to the top of my list, or maybe another person
> will come forward to work on makeinfo instead of switching to texi2html.

I am not sure that it makes sense. In my opinion the fact that texi2html
is non-GNU is not very relevant, the real difference is that texi2html
is written in perl, so that it is very easy to write code to expand it.

I haven't read the makeinfo code and I may be completly wrong in the
following, but my guess is that it could be doable to have hooks for
user defined functions since makeinfo is already able to output
different formats. But since they should be written in C, compiled and
linked, it doesn't really make sense since the interface would
necessarily be complicated, while in texi2html it is very simple thanks
to perl simplicity.

The downside of using perl is that texi2html is incredibly slow compared
with makeinfo and may be less portable (but I am not sure that this is
really an issue).

So unless it becomes possible to hook a simpler language than C in
makeinfo I think that makeinfo cannot be changed to do what texi2html
does. But I may be wrong, of course.

Having duplication is not an issue, in my opinion, when different designs
nullifies the economies of scale associated with merging projects.

--
Pat