Re: [ANNOUNCE] GIT 1.5.3-rc4

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Aug 5, 2007, 19:29 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0708051221290.5037@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <85bqdlj1lh.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>

On Sun, 5 Aug 2007, David Kastrup wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

>
> > 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.

No. Emacs _is_ odd. It's not even installed by default on most modern Linux distributions.

There's no name-calling there. That's just a solid fact. You are emacs-fixated when you keep on trying to bring up totally irrelevant emacs issues.

> 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.

You do not even know what you are talking about.

AsciiDoc is *also* a source format. But the source format is already readable IN ITSELF. Which is the whole point!

I don't even bother to run "make doc". I bet that is true of almost everybody else too. Why? Because the *source* format we use (asciidoc) is already basically as readable as any formatted man-page would ever be.

You don't have to even *know* that they are AsciiDoc pages - they're just called "*.txt", and that's what they are. Text. With very minimal fixups that *allow* them to be used as source for things like html, and admittedly you get prettier output, but it really is perfectly straightforward to just read them, in ways that pretty much no other documentation format allows. Everybody else puts very intrusive crap in there, so that you *have* to be aware of in ways you don't need to worry about in AsciiDoc.

Headers? Lists? They look like headers and lists in the .txt files. No need to think about it as a reader.

See? Texinfo is decidedly inferior. But you don't have to take it so personally. So is pretty much anything else. Anything XML/SGML is even *worse*.

			Linus