Re: [ANNOUNCE] GIT 1.5.3-rc4

From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
Date: Aug 5, 2007, 10:20 UTC
Message-ID: <851weib7v3.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>
In-Reply-To: <20070805095928.GA15949@coredump.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 19 quoted lines

> On Sun, Aug 05, 2007 at 11:54:51AM +0200, David Kastrup wrote:
>
>> >> (info "(gcc) Extended Asm")
>> >> 
>> >> and when you are reading mail in Emacs, you can click on that line
>> >> and get to the respective page in a manual comprising hundreds of
>> >> pages.
>> >
>> > Ugh. A documentation referencing system that works only in one
>> > particular editor,
>> 
>> That works in readers of the info format.  Do HTML references work
>> outside of HTML readers?
>
> I'm not talking about the _format_, I'm talking about the _referencing
> system_. In other words, because URLs are a standard, there are
> thousands of programs which recognize them and can find the resource
> they mention (which in turn, may spawn an info reader, an html reader,
> or some other interpreter).

Well, just for kicks I let firefox loose on

info:gcc#Extended Asm

It passed this off to the GNOME help browser, which displayed "Loading...", used up 4 seconds of CPU time and 100M of memory, and then hanged itself with a spinning cursor.

Interesting. Starting the help browser manually and typing the URL in, however, works. It just seems to suicide when firefox tells it about URLs.

> What software is going to recognize (info "(gcc) Extended Asm") in
> your email and realize that it's a reference to another document?
> None, except emacs.

Sure.  So use the above syntax.

> Though I don't especially like the info format or readers, my
> argument here isn't against it. It is against the feature you
> mentioned being a substantial benefit, since a large part of the
> world isn't reading their email in emacs.

So write it as a URL, if you want to.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum