Re: Info download service

[Patrice Dumas]

On Fri, Jan 12, 2024 at 02:42:58PM +0000, Daniel Cerqueira wrote:
> My GNU/Linux-libre system does not have that problem. And that would
> lead to centralization of manuals, and are we sick of centralization?

Not necessarily centralization of manuals, but maybe centralization of
manual locations, to know where to download from.  We already have
something like that for HTML cross references, actually, the htmlxref.cnf
file, which is maintained in Texinfo.
https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/HTML-Xref-Configuration.html

That being said, even if it is only centralization of where to find
manuals, any centralization is not ideal, but I can't see another way to
do it.

> Also, it will begin as authors having to upload their manuals to a
> central place, only to later that place having problems and having to
> make some restrictions, and then new book places arise where you could
> upload books with less restrictive policies than the central place,
> resulting in people having to upload to various places, or else no one
> will read their books. Also distributions stopped providing info books
> (they only offer a link) since there is already a outside place that
> hosts books for them.

This is already possible to do that, most of the info manuals are also
quite easily available from the web.  Of course there is still some work
to do before making it easier, as we are discussing here, but in any case, if
anybody wants to do that code, we cannot stop Distributions from using
it.  I do not believe that it would be a code hard to do, so I do not
think that whether we do it or not changes much the possibility of
having only online info manuals.  If we want Info manuals to keep being
installed, we must be convincing, as we cannot have any real control.
This is the same for HTML manuals, in the long term the plan is to have
HTML manuals used for local browsing, I think that we need to be
convincing here, such that Distributions install locally HTML manual.

> Things are good as they are. My best advice is to change from Debian to
> Parabola.

Even if this is an issue that is more pregnant with Debian because of
their policy regarding GFDL with invariant sections, this is an issue
that exists for any Distribution that do not install all the manuals
linked to from an installed Info manual.

-- 
Pat