On Sun, Feb 07, 2016 at 14:23:29 -0800, Christopher Allan Webber wrote: > Texinfo is pretty nice to use if you're an emacs user... in fact, if > you're an emacs user, it's the best documentation reading system in the > world. But not everyone's an emacs user.
It's also the required documentation format for GNU projects. > If the html export was nicely themed, that could help a lot. Maybe > other things could also be done, I'm not sure. I had some decent success with the GNU ease.js manual: https://gnu.org/software/easejs/manual.html http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/easejs.git/tree/doc/Makefile.am ...unfortunately it required some post-processing: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/easejs.git/tree/tools/webdoc?h=website That doesn't do well to help makeinfo's case, but the changes weren't all that complicated, and I think that a few good configuration options would produce some good results. > I'm not super excited dealing with all the m4-expanded shell, I'd still > love a Guile based autotools replacement that implements the ./configure > && make interface still. I'm not sure it'll happen. Maybe someone will > pick it up? That's not a trivial problem to solve. If you take a look through the Auto{make,conf} documentation and script output---while a lot of it exists to handle various types of systems which Guile will need to worry about a whole lot less, since it's contained---it handles quite a bit. For GNU evaluations, we find that it's very hard to get a configure and build system that meets GNU standards without it. But the declarative approach offered by Scheme is very appealing. Perhaps one idea is to start by compiling a Scheme representation into Auto{conf,make}. This could also have the benefit of generating the necessary boilerplate with a (probably very) concise syntax. The result will be a standard build process that could then have pieces slowly replaced with pure Guile Scheme. Since Guile is a standard part of the GNU operating system, this might also be a reasonable option for many other projects, even if they don't themselves use Guile as a language. It's possible that this might only ever be a subset of all the features that Auto{conf,make} offer, but a subset is all most people need. > In the meanwhile we've had some conversations about this, see David > Thompson's RFC on a Guile project generator: > > https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-user/2015-09/msg00042.html I like this idea, even if the above is implemented. -- Mike Gerwitz Free Software Hacker | GNU Maintainer https://mikegerwitz.com FSF Member #5804 | GPG Key ID: 0x8EE30EAB
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