Re: Org mode and Emacs

[Ihor Radchenko]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> > 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.

There is a single word "directives" in
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/texinfo.git/plain/NEWS:

    . #line directives are recognized.

>> 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.

I understand. However, new features are added to Texinfo for a reason.
If the same reason is valid for Org, equivalent features may be added.
Similarly, we may add features to Org that have no equivalent in
Texinfo. So, this is a normal development process with new features
being proposed, discussed, and maybe added.

>From my point of view, equivalence with Texinfo is not something we care
as much about yet. It is just a general direction we can use for Org
development. I deem it useful even if we cannot reach all the Texinfo
features at the end. But if we can, we can _later_ see further about how
we want to incorporate (or not) new Texinfo features.

>> > 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.

AFAIU, the conversion is done in
/usr/share/texinfo/Texinfo/Convert/Info.pm
I do not see anything extraordinary. Org uses similar approach - working
with parse tree.

-- 
Ihor Radchenko // yantar92,
Org mode contributor,
Learn more about Org mode at <https://orgmode.org/>.
Support Org development at <https://liberapay.com/org-mode>,
or support my work at <https://liberapay.com/yantar92>