On Tue, Jul 26, 2022 at 04:49:27PM +0000, Werner LEMBERG wrote: > > > We (I) could also propose too help and volunteer to change the > > manuals to accompany the change. Maybe advertise it on some GNU > > lists, in addition to the help-texinfo list. > > While this shows good intentions, it certainly fails in the long run. > There are simply too many manuals in the wild, and not everybody > contacts the 'bug-texinfo' mailing list if problems appear. A more > likely outcome is that people will use such a backward incompatibility > as a welcome excuse to change their documentation system to something > 'more modern'.
I really don't know about that. To be able to know that in advance, one would need to investigate and compare with a counterfactual in which the change was not implemented. This is already hard to do ex-post, since we do not have much information on the impact of the changes in Texinfo, ex-ante would be very hard. Other theories could be formulated, such as "people will be able to drop some of their tricks to have a better output now that the behaviour is consistent and won't switch to another more consistent system", or "people do not care about the formatting much, they use Texinfo for the language syntax". But we lack evidence on adoption mechanisms, adoption rates and counterfactuals. -- Pat
