Re: [RFC] Moving "manual.org" into core

[Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>]

I'm sure this is an impressive technical achievement, but can I urge you
to raise this on emacs-devel first, because I think it's potentially
problematic.

I'm not entirely sure what you are proposing here. If the .org version
will become the "preferred form" for modification, it would eg need to
be in the Emacs repository (when the time comes), with suitable Makefile
rules for generating the final products from it, and distributed
correctly in releases. Emacs has got into trouble before in this area.

Bastien Guerry wrote:

> One of my worries was that moving toward editing a manual in .org
> does not match GNU developers good practices and habits, which are
> to edit .texi files.  But as long as the .texi file exists I guess
> we can shake the habits by allowing to edit .org files, which are
> more convenient to read and write.

Speaking for myself, I don't want to learn yet another markup syntax for
one single Emacs manual. I find it unlikely that GNU projects will start
requiring Emacs to build their documentation. Although the GNU coding
standards do say:

https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/GNU-Manuals.html#GNU-Manuals

    Nowadays some other formats such as Docbook and Sgmltexi can be
    converted automatically into Texinfo. It is ok to produce the Texinfo
    documentation by conversion this way, as long as it gives good results. 

so there's no problem from that aspect.

> But still: RMS recently raised the question on emacs-devel of
> whether using .rst for the GNU documentation would be better,
> so using .org for this purpose is not entirely hypothetical.

On the subject of rst, I can only find a topic two years ago that went
nowhere, and note in particular this:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2016-02/msg00667.html

   "We don't want to replace Texinfo as the source language"


Maybe I'm worried about nothing, but I do suggest asking on emacs-devel.