Re: Bug tracker for skribilo

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi!

Arun Isaac <arunisaac@systemreboot.net> skribis:

>> I’m happy to let you apply, if you don’t mind.
>
> Sure, the process is underway! See
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-debbugs/2022-03/msg00001.html

Yay!

> Yes, definitely, plenty of ideas and lots of work to do! I think we
> should meet up online more often. Guix Days once a year is too
> infrequent. I'm thinking once every 3 or 4 months. It can get pretty
> lonely working on Guix with no one to talk to.

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

> Another idea that I didn't mention in the talk, is that we should use
> Skribilo for the Guix manual! :-) It would be good for both Skribilo and
> Guix. The kind of gymnastics (preprocessing, postprocessing and what
> not) we currently have to do with texinfo is amazingly bad. "Documents
> as software" is a powerful idea, and currently the skribilo manual
> doesn't really do it justice. Imagine how much more consistent and
> comprehensive the Guix manual could be if parts of it were
> autogenerated. I'm all for developing skribilo into a full-fledged
> texinfo replacement! :-)

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.

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.

Food for thought!

Ludo’.