On 27/07/2024 20:00, Nate Bargmann wrote:
Texinfo is from a time when GNU documentation was only man pages or flat text files and something "better" was desired for moving through a manual in what is now known as a hypertext format. It also includes a lot of semantic markup rather than the basics forms of emphasis included in HTML. It is actually a rather capable format it's just that the info format and the info utility intended for terminal display throw nearly all of that away.
Certainly viewers for texinfo docs have usability issues. tkinfo or emacs are more friendly than the info(1) "browser".
On the other hand, texinfo is, unlike man, is hypertext to much more degree. Heuristic in debiman (manpages.debian.org) is better than in other tools in respect to guessing what part of text should be rendered as links, but it is still limited.
There is no convention concerning "active" links to specific anchor in a man page and it is an issue in the case of long manuals. I think, e.g. Emacs manual would be unusable as a man page.
There are issues with cross-document texinfo links. Desktop environments provide help tools that may render info docs, but "(bash) Bash Variables" would not work there and "copy link" may be missed. I would like to have something like sphinx index files that contains list of anchors in documents.
Texinfo semantic markup is really a feature. Full support is not trivial though since images and equations are allowed. It is an obstacle on the way toward better tools.
I do not mind to have info.debian.org. However single page variant leads to excessively large documents. Existing tools have no intermediate level, the only other supported mode is an HTML page per texinfo node. It is inconvenient to walk through many single paragraph or menu only pages. Search in whole document is another issue with granular texinfo documents published on web sites.
Something more advanced than man pages is necessary, but texinfo is not unambiguously better in its current form.
P.S. The following is from "emacs --help". From my point of view there are too many steps to reach specific mode to call it convenient. It is for Emacs that may be named a native tool to read info docs.
Run M-x info RET m emacs RET m emacs invocation RET inside Emacs to read the main documentation for these command-line arguments.
