Re: [ANNOUNCE] GIT 1.5.3-rc4

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

On Sat, Aug 04, 2007 at 07:49:36PM +0200, David Kastrup wrote:

quoted

I can specify something like

(info "(gcc) Extended Asm")

and when you are reading mail in Emacs, you can click on that line
and get to the respective page in a manual comprising hundreds of
pages.

Ugh. A documentation referencing system that works only in one
particular editor,

That works in readers of the info format.  Do HTML references work
outside of HTML readers?

or with one particular documentation format?

Please, the net decided on a standard for referencing resources long
ago, and they are called URLs.

The last time I looked, URLs were not a common way to implement
bookmarks except in HTML, namely "with one particular documentation
format".

And you don't need an HTML reader to use those "resources" in HTML?
Get real.

Anyway, the referencing in _Texinfo_ gets translated into info
references in info formats, URL bookmarks in HTML, PDF links in PDF
and a textual description (since you can't let a URL point into a
section of a plain text file) in plain text output.  All those are
_common_ ways of making references, and certainly "the net" has not
decided to pick any of those exclusively.

That the particular format "info" _also_ is able to represent the
respective information originally written into _Texinfo_ source is
hardly a disadvantage.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum

On Sun, Aug 05, 2007 at 11:54:51AM +0200, David Kastrup wrote:

quoted

quoted

(info "(gcc) Extended Asm")

and when you are reading mail in Emacs, you can click on that line
and get to the respective page in a manual comprising hundreds of
pages.

Ugh. A documentation referencing system that works only in one
particular editor,

That works in readers of the info format.  Do HTML references work
outside of HTML readers?

I'm not talking about the _format_, I'm talking about the _referencing
system_. In other words, because URLs are a standard, there are
thousands of programs which recognize them and can find the resource
they mention (which in turn, may spawn an info reader, an html reader,
or some other interpreter).

What software is going to recognize (info "(gcc) Extended Asm") in your
email and realize that it's a reference to another document? None,
except emacs.

Though I don't especially like the info format or readers, my argument
here isn't against it. It is against the feature you mentioned being a
substantial benefit, since a large part of the world isn't reading their
email in emacs.

-Peff