Re: Org mode and Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@posteo.net>
> Cc: rms@gnu.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Wed, 06 Sep 2023 13:20:21 +0000
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> >> I am not sure about catchup game. Unless Texinfo drastically changes the
> >> output format, we can simply provide default settings to replicate the
> >> Texinfo look of the produced html/pdf/plaintext/info files.
> >
> > Not the output format, but the language: new directives and sometimes
> > markup are added with every release of Texinfo.  Just read their NEWS
> > file.
> 
> The way I see Org markup extension would make it easy to users add new
> custom markup, as needed. Then, no frequent changes to the base markup
> will be necessary to accommodate for less common use cases.

You missed the "new directives" part.  I do recommend reading their
NEWS to get the idea of the rate at which new features are added to
Texinfo.

> In other words, I do not see why Org should support every single Texinfo
> markup. We just need to provide enough support to be on par in terms of
> the needs of manual authors.

GNU Manuals use a large portion of what Texinfo provides, and limiting
what they could use when they write in Org would mean some Texinfo
features cannot be used that way, which is a disadvantage.  People
will have to think twice before they switch to Org, because at some
point they might want to use a feature you decided not to support.

> > That was for Org-to-Texinfo conversion.  Here we are talking about
> > Org-to-Info, which is much more work.
> 
> Why so?

Because the production rules are much more complex.  I suggest to take
a look at the Perl source code of texi2any to see what it entails.