From: David Kastrup <hidden> Date: 2016-06-15 22:43:27
Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] writes:
On Sun, 5 Aug 2007, David Kastrup wrote:
quoted
So please get a grip and focus on what we were actually talking
about. Not Emacs, but rather documentation formats.
You're the one who started talking about me expecting people to use
*my* editor. I had never done that. I had talked about the
_reverse_: the idiocy of emacs users expecting people to use that
bloated piece of crap-ware.
Yes, and it was not the topic. So I pointed out your hypocrisy since
_you_ talk about editor preferences and "normal" people, while
preferring an editor yourself that is used by far fewer people.
You are still unable to focus on anything but name-calling and editors
rather than documentation formats.
So stop this *insane* insistence of emacs. You should learn to just
assume that people don't even have it installed!
We were discussing Texinfo, not Emacs. Please focus.
Anything that works with some random emacs mode is a total
non-usable piece of crap as far as most users are concerned.
Again, you are speaking for the rest of the world, conveniently
ignoring that more people use such a system than the one you use. But
please stop focusing on editors and focus on documentation formats.
quoted
Focus. How do you propose to manage documention of a hundred pages
an more conveniently, finding information easily by text, index,
hyperlinks? A single large HTML page? A documentation directory
full of *.txt files which you can grep through (not that Emacs
would not be useful for that, too)?
Oh, a single large html page is certainly better than emacs and
info, absolutely. Ask *any* normal person.
Which is why books nowadays always come as a single scroll without
index and table of contents, right? Ask any normal person.
The fact that you cannot see that fact is a sign of your personal
(and rather odd) preferences.
Yes, name-calling and ad hominem attacks again. It's getting old. So
you think a single large html page containing everything in the
git/Documentation directory is the way we should organize git
documentation for the sake of the users? All manual pages one after
the other, and some text in between explaining the connections? In
one large file?
While harping on my sanity and normality because of contemplating
something more structured?
Please.
For what it's worth: Texinfo documents _can_ be converted into a
single HTML file as _well_ as a hierarchically split document with a
hyperlinked index. So using Texinfo as a source format would _still_
allow preparing HTML in both multiple and single file form for the
sake of Torvalds-normal users.
Please try to remember that Texinfo is a _source_ format, and it
produces reasonably hyperrefed and coherent PDF and HTML documents as
well as plain ASCII. That it is also able to produce working info
files should not bother you.
--
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum
You are still unable to focus on anything but name-calling and editors
rather than documentation formats.
No, it's the same thing.
I started out by saying that Texinfo is horrible. It's horrible because it
doesn't *buy* you anything. The only thing it buys you (the "info" format)
is totally irrelevant, which I tried to explain.
AsciiDoc is much nicer. It does everything that Texinfo does for us, and
it's readable on its own as plain text, something Texinfo isn't.
So by advocating Texinfo, you're advocating something that is OBJECTIVELY
WORSE than what we have now.
And I tried to explain why, by pointing out that info files (which was the
case you tried to push as an advantage) aren't actually an advantage to
any normal user.
Linus
From: Johannes Schindelin <hidden> Date: 2016-06-15 22:43:27
Hi,
On Sun, 5 Aug 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote:
quoted
You are still unable to focus on anything but name-calling and editors
rather than documentation formats.
No, it's the same thing.
Hehe. Statements like the first made me set up a certain procmail filter.
Made me much happier, too.
And now I see only one side of the conversation, which is actually pretty
funny... much like listening in into a heated phone conversation, and
guessing what the other one said. *grin*
Ciao,
Dscho
The fact that you cannot see that fact is a sign of your personal
(and rather odd) preferences.
Yes, name-calling and ad hominem attacks again.
No. Emacs _is_ odd. It's not even installed by default on most modern
Linux distributions.
There's no name-calling there. That's just a solid fact. You are
emacs-fixated when you keep on trying to bring up totally irrelevant
emacs issues.
Please try to remember that Texinfo is a _source_ format, and it
produces reasonably hyperrefed and coherent PDF and HTML documents as
well as plain ASCII. That it is also able to produce working info
files should not bother you.
You do not even know what you are talking about.
AsciiDoc is *also* a source format. But the source format is already
readable IN ITSELF. Which is the whole point!
I don't even bother to run "make doc". I bet that is true of almost
everybody else too. Why? Because the *source* format we use (asciidoc) is
already basically as readable as any formatted man-page would ever be.
You don't have to even *know* that they are AsciiDoc pages - they're just
called "*.txt", and that's what they are. Text. With very minimal fixups
that *allow* them to be used as source for things like html, and
admittedly you get prettier output, but it really is perfectly
straightforward to just read them, in ways that pretty much no other
documentation format allows. Everybody else puts very intrusive crap in
there, so that you *have* to be aware of in ways you don't need to worry
about in AsciiDoc.
Headers? Lists? They look like headers and lists in the .txt files. No
need to think about it as a reader.
See? Texinfo is decidedly inferior. But you don't have to take it so
personally. So is pretty much anything else. Anything XML/SGML is even
*worse*.
Linus
From: Bruce Korb <hidden> Date: 2016-06-15 22:43:27
Linus Torvalds wrote:
quoted
Yes, name-calling and ad hominem attacks again.
No. Emacs _is_ odd. It's not even installed by default on most modern
Linux distributions.
Hi Linus,
Thus disparaging distributions that do install it. I've not had
to pull any extra packages to get it so far, but I only update
every few years. I've been a happy emacs user for 24 years.
There's no name-calling there. That's just a solid fact.
The name calling is unseemly on all sides.
quoted
Please try to remember that Texinfo is a _source_ format, and it
produces reasonably hyperrefed and coherent PDF and HTML documents as
well as plain ASCII. That it is also able to produce working info
files should not bother you.
You do not even know what you are talking about.
AsciiDoc is *also* a source format. But the source format is already
readable IN ITSELF. Which is the whole point!
Readable, just not writable. It's markup language is a bunch
of special characters that require familiarity to understand.
Sure, you can peruse the text just fine, but why should this
sort of thing:
= My Doc Title =
be preferred to:
@settitle My Doc Title
@chapter, @section, @subsection really make a lot more sense to me
than this sort of cruft (my disparaging term):
Level 0 (top level): ======================
Level 1: ----------------------
Level 2: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Level 3: ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Level 4 (bottom level): ++++++++++++++++++++++
It really boils down to preferences and familiarity and should
not degenerate into nasty name calling.
Headers? Lists? They look like headers and lists in the .txt files. No
need to think about it as a reader.
So do well-formatted .texi docs. I don't really like anything
other than WYSIWYG, but that doesn't lend it self to reformatting
into man pages et al.
See? Texinfo is decidedly inferior. But you don't have to take it so
personally. So is pretty much anything else. Anything XML/SGML is even
*worse*.
Bah! They all have their drawbacks and preferences are going to weight
drawbacks differently.
So let's all dislike all our choices, eh? Cheers - Bruce