On Wed, Apr 05, 2023 at 12:12:16PM +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote: > On Wed, Apr 05, 2023 at 11:03:36AM +0200, to...@tuxteam.de wrote: > > > > I was dreaming of a world where both doc systems converge > > in a way their respective users don't notice, and we end > > up with a Grand Unified Documentation (GUD) for all things > > free.
First of all, sorry for hijacking the thread. I now changed the subject accordingly. I'm aware that the unification idea gets extremely messy in the details. Thank you, Patrick, for going into some of them so well. Thanks also for the many references, that will make some reading for the long weekend :-) That said, I think the problem is as much a social as it is a technical problem. You won't "win over" someone who has been using man pages all the time and is happy with it to info and vice versa. Common authoring formats goes some of the way; enabling viewers to "consume" other presentation formats, too (because users haven't to change their preferred viewers). Cross links is an interesting idea. What I've been mulling about is "abstract links" (e.g. "the Curl documentation, whatever format it happens to be in). Org goes some way in this direction, but only in part. > https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/Info-Format-Specification.html Meta: this is a very nice example: I do have info on my box. I'd much prefer to use that than the web browser (an application I've learnt to hate more and more over the last years). Of course, writing to a mailing list, you've got to address the lowest common denominator, and this is a Web URL these days (the URI was a good idea with some issues, but was thrown under the bus). As a thought experiment: what would it take for that reference above to (also) open a local info viewer? The technical part is easy: recognize the prefix and substitute it. The exciting part is rather: we need some rule set to "build" the URLs as the one above which is sufficiently stable to build applications on top of that. I think the XML folks had already some tidbits (e.g. the "catalog" thing, which made it possible to abstract whether a doc was local or remote). Cheers & thanks -- t
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