Re: Disable texinfo by default?

["Kamil Rytarowski" <n54%gmx.com@localhost>]

Greg Troxel wrote
> 
> info should stay.  There are lots of info files that have more content
> than man pages, and it is unique among the fancier documentation formats
> in that it can be nicely read inside an xterm.
> 
> It also seem totally unreasoanble to disable info, rather than following
> the migration of upstream info docs to the new bikeshed format, when
> doing imports of new versions that have migrated.
> 
> For disabling MKFOO by default, I think the test should be that most
> people doing builds are turning it off because it is more trouble than
> it's worth.    This is the first time I've heard of anyone wanting to
> turn off MKINFO (by itself, without basically turning off everything for
> a tiny footprint system).
> 
> /usr/share/info (netbsd-6) is 12M.   That's a tiny fraction of base.
> 
> What's the gain in disabling it?
> 
- texinfo is GNU / GPLv3
- GNU tool-chain documentation seems under supported (see below)
- its in pkgsrc


Greg Troxel wrote
> 
> In general, it's starting to feel like there are more random proposals
> to delete things that don't address the overall cost/benefit.
> 

and

Valery Ushakov wrote
> 
> Are you serious?  Emacs has just started "debating the idea" and you
> already rush in to disable it?
> 

No, this was just amusing because I remember very well RMS proclaiming
firmly that GNU hackers prefer info over man pages.

Well, in last few years I keep having impression that this documentation
is mostly unmaintained and too often when I need to rebuild GNU core tools
(GCC, binutils, GDB) in a GNU environment I have to patch the source for
'@@symbol' -> '@symbol' (or the opposite direction) because it breaks the
build. For years nobody cared about warnings?

Since 2008 there were 3 releases (5.0, 5.1, 5.2) with them breakage
with each version in the core GNU tool-chain.

My personal impression is that people are tired of the total breakage,
which started with the version 5.0. Talking about the www presentability
(info can be exported to html) is just looking for an official nicely
looking reason to replace it (grin and bear it).

From other BSDs, recently FreeBSD removed info with all info pages
https://reviews.freebsd.org/rS276551 (it was committed)

I follow what Joerg says, as long as GNU tools ships with info,
it's OK to ship with it in the base.

Regards.