GNU Texinfo 5.0 Released

Four years after the last release, version 5.0 of Texinfo, the GNU documentation language, has been released. The primary highlight is a new implementation of makeinfo info in Perl rather than C. Although slower, the new version offers several advantages: cleaner code using a structured representation of the input document, Unicode support, and saner support for multiple output backends. There are over a dozen other improvements including better formatting of URLs, improved cross-manual references, and a program to convert Perl POD documentation to Texinfo.

Comments

man texinfo

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't be much use, it doesn't have a man page.

Re:Will an end user notice this speed degradation?

[larry bagina]

how often do you run makeinfo? Probably never directly. And only indirectly if you're compiling and installing a GNU package from source (I mean, who else even uses it? )-- in which case configure checks and compilation times are the bottleneck, not makeinfo

Default to HTML yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't used TexInfo for years, but what I remember most was the absolutely abysmal standalone "info" reader. That thing was the biggest piece of shit I've ever seen in any program. Hopefully they've abandoned the crappy "info" format and all of the shitty standalone readers to view info documents, and just use HTML by default now.

Re:Default to HTML yet?

[Waffle Iron]

have you seen the HTML that gets generated from TeXInfo?

Yes. It's usually broken up into a massive hierarchy with a couple of sentences per page. You'll get cramps clicking on the navigation links while searching for the particular thing you need to find like a needle in a haystack.

Plain old man pages (especially when nicely rendered in KDE's Konqueror web browser by typing "#program-name" into the URL box) are almost invariably superior to the corresponding Texinfo docs converted to html.

Perl???

[mark-t]

Why on earth would they have picked perl? Perl isn't really a native gnu project. At least gcc is.

Re:Speed.

[Anonymous Coward]

I love how a language that was "fast enough" in the '90s is now suddenly "too slow" in 2013.

No-one said it was "too slow", if they thought that they wouldn't have released it. They said it was slower than the C version, which is (presumably, as I haven't measured it myself) an objective fact.

Do not want

[GlobalEcho]

Allow me to initiate the inevitable hatefest:

Every time I run man and get a pointer to texinfo, I want to beat my head on the keyboard. I do not have the time, once again, to look up those obscure keyboard commands so that I may navigate laboriously through the documentation. It's time to interrupt my command-line workflow, go to the nearest GUI and run a web search for the nearest HTML manual.

Re:Do not want

[Nimey]

Agreed. The worst is when a package has a half-assed manpage that points to the info documentation, and when you fire up info it's the exact same stuff as the manpage.

Texinfo should be retired in favor of HTML for when there's too much documentation for a man page.

Re:Do not want

[dbIII]

It was even worse when you type "man foo", get a message telling you man is evil and to use info, then the info gives you nothing but a placeholder. The gnome stuff was full of that (gconf stuff especially) before they decided to not even bother pretending they had documentation.
Back in the day doing "man grub", getting a rude message to use info, then "info grub" and getting a "grub is wonderful LILO sux" message and no documentation was definitely one of those moments where I wanted to beat somebody's head with a model M keyboard.
At least "pinfo" can be used without having to spend more time working out how to use the info tool than reading the documentation.

HTML from the 1990s

[tepples]

The 1990s, when HTML documents were readable and not stuffed to the gills with ads and social recommendation detritus. Really all a plain-jane HTML document is missing is a max-width:36em on body to make line lengths sane and a width=device-width on the viewport to make tablets not render it zoomed out.

Re:Things you don't hear every day

[one eyed kangaroo]

A witty response, but really this is getting a bit tired.

I suppose people are free to keep reading the same old, self-reinforcing sources that insist that Perl is somehow a language of the past. And if they read enough of these cliches, the anti-Perl FUD may seem to be accurate, but as any developer who spends time wrestling with real-world problems in modern Perl will attest, the so-called modern Perl ecosystem is, (just like the modern Python or PHP ecosystems), a fabulous place to work in.

I work in all three.

Re:Oblig oblig XKCD

[TheRaven64]

Being the official anything of the GNU project pretty much guarantees that no other part of the GNU project will use your stuff.