Re: Move GNU manual pages to the Linux man-pages project

[Collin Funk <collin.funk1@gmail.com>]

William Bader <williambader@hotmail.com> writes:

>> I guess Markdown or reStructuredText would be more friendly to new contributors since many do not know Texinfo.
>
> Pandoc https://pandoc.org/ can convert between a number of formats. In
> theory, it can convert markdown and rst to texinfo. Maybe with care it
> would be possible to come up with a set of conventions for markdown,
> maybe with a preprocessing pass, to have pandoc produce texinfo that
> can print well.

I have heard the name, but I have never used it.

Sphinx, used by Python [1] and the Linux Kernel [2], creates nice
searchable HTML pages. Apparently there is an experimental Texinfo
converter [3]. I don't see most GNU projects using anything that doesn't
create good info pages, though. Although some have mentioned not liking
the 'info' reader, I find the one in Emacs to be nice to use.

GCC switched to Sphinx for a very short period and then reverted the
pages, if I remember correctly. See mailing list drama involved in that
change [4].

Collin

[1] https://docs.python.org/3/
[2] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
[3] https://mysphinx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/faq.html#texinfo-info
[4] https://inbox.sourceware.org/gcc/1a22bc37-3d48-132f-a3d5-219471cd443c@suse.cz/