Re: [ANNOUNCE] GIT 1.5.3-rc4

From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
Date: Aug 5, 2007, 18:08 UTC
Message-ID: <85bqdlj1lh.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0708051004480.5037@woody.linux-foundation.org>

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:

Show 9 quoted lines

> On Sun, 5 Aug 2007, David Kastrup wrote:
>> 
>> So please get a grip and focus on what we were actually talking
>> about.  Not Emacs, but rather documentation formats.
>
> You're the one who started talking about me expecting people to use
> *my* editor. I had never done that. I had talked about the
> _reverse_: the idiocy of emacs users expecting people to use that
> bloated piece of crap-ware.

Yes, and it was not the topic. So I pointed out your hypocrisy since _you_ talk about editor preferences and "normal" people, while preferring an editor yourself that is used by far fewer people.

You are still unable to focus on anything but name-calling and editors rather than documentation formats.

> So stop this *insane* insistence of emacs. You should learn to just
> assume that people don't even have it installed!

We were discussing Texinfo, not Emacs.  Please focus.

> Anything that works with some random emacs mode is a total
> non-usable piece of crap as far as most users are concerned.

Again, you are speaking for the rest of the world, conveniently ignoring that more people use such a system than the one you use. But please stop focusing on editors and focus on documentation formats.

Show 8 quoted lines

>> Focus.  How do you propose to manage documention of a hundred pages
>> an more conveniently, finding information easily by text, index,
>> hyperlinks?  A single large HTML page?  A documentation directory
>> full of *.txt files which you can grep through (not that Emacs
>> would not be useful for that, too)?
>
> Oh, a single large html page is certainly better than emacs and
> info, absolutely. Ask *any* normal person.

Which is why books nowadays always come as a single scroll without index and table of contents, right? Ask any normal person.

> The fact that you cannot see that fact is a sign of your personal
> (and rather odd) preferences.

Yes, name-calling and ad hominem attacks again. It's getting old. So you think a single large html page containing everything in the git/Documentation directory is the way we should organize git documentation for the sake of the users? All manual pages one after the other, and some text in between explaining the connections? In one large file?

While harping on my sanity and normality because of contemplating something more structured?

Please.

For what it's worth: Texinfo documents _can_ be converted into a single HTML file as _well_ as a hierarchically split document with a hyperlinked index. So using Texinfo as a source format would _still_ allow preparing HTML in both multiple and single file form for the sake of Torvalds-normal users.

Please try to remember that Texinfo is a _source_ format, and it produces reasonably hyperrefed and coherent PDF and HTML documents as well as plain ASCII. That it is also able to produce working info files should not bother you.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum