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Re: Next approach: Documentation Policy



> On Wed, 2 Jul 1997, Federico Di Gregorio wrote:
> 
> > > Fernando wrote:
> > > 
> > > >So why we are still distributing the man sources instead of pre-formatted
> > > >man pages? 
> > > 
> > > So we can format them nicely in PostScript with "man -t".
> > 
> > 
> > If this is true why dont we shif .texi sources so that everybody
> > can format them nicely in PostScript with "tex ; dvips"?
> 
> I just picked two .texi files at random (mysql-faq, and bashref) and tried
> to run "makeinfo" and "tex" on them. Both had compilation problems with at
> least one of these two programs. (Perhaps I was just unlucky.)

The same luck as to compile original source out of the box. That's why
we have .diff files.

> 
> Of course, it looks like a good idea to just ship the .texi source code
> and let the user decide which formats he/she wants to get. There are some
> problems, though:
> 
>   - compilation takes some time on slow computers
> 
>   - you need a lot of packages to make all compilers work (I think we
> would have to try to assemble them in a single package)
> 
>   - it's hard to get the compilation error free (see above)
> 
> My experience is (though I'm really no export here), that "makeinfo"
> usually does not have much problems and is quite fast. "texi2html" is
> slow. "tex" (to get the postscript output) is _very slow_.
> 
> So what about this:
> 
>   - we ship precompiled HTML files _and_ texinfo source code 
> 
>   - /usr/info/*.info files are generated on request, only
> 
>   - PostScript files can be compiled on request (requires some packages,
> though) or can be downloaded from a ftp server
> 
> 
> Any comments?
> 

Great idea!

Alex Y.

 
> Thanks,
> 
> Chris
> 
> --                  Christian Schwarz
>                    schwarz@monet.m.isar.de, schwarz@schwarz-online.com
>                   schwarz@debian.org, schwarz@mathematik.tu-muenchen.de
>                        
>                 PGP-fp: 8F 61 EB 6D CF 23 CA D7  34 05 14 5C C8 DC 22 BA
>               
>  CS Software goes online! Visit our new home page at
>  	                                     http://www.schwarz-online.com
> 

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