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

Things you don't hear every day

[Anonymous Coward]

"Nobody could understand the source code anymore without massive doses of caffeine... ao we decided to rewrite the whole thing in Perl."

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:Things you don't hear every day

[VortexCortex]

"Nobody could understand the source code anymore without massive doses of caffeine... ao we decided to rewrite the whole thing in Perl."

Oblig xkcd

Obligatory Rebuttal xkcd

This is interesting for two reasons:
0. It was Perl's built in features, such as regex, system calls, and ability to be terse enough to enter a solution on a single swinging pass that make it an obvious choice -- It was made for this type of job.
1. I'm confident that if we have not already, we will soon reach a point where entire discussions can be composed of no text other than xkcd links.

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.

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

[sombragris]

Try pinfo. From the description:

Pinfo is an info file viewer. It was created when the author, Przemek Borys, was very depressed trying to read gtk info entries using the standard tools.

Pinfo is similar in use to lynx. It has similar key movements, and gives similar intuition. You just move across info nodes, and select links, follow them... Well, you know how it is when you view html with lynx. :) It supports as many colors as it could.

Believe me, it's a lifesaver for reading info pages.