manpage writing [rst, asciidoc, pod] was [Re: What should Python apps do when asked to show help?]

Paul Rubin no.email at nospam.invalid
Sat Apr 30 03:44:29 EDT 2016


Rustom Mody <rustompmody at gmail.com> writes:
> At that point what I gleaned was that original makeinfo was in C
> New one was rewritten in perl.

The previous one was definitely written in C and I've looked at the code
some.  I hadn't known there was a new one.  The C one was actually the
second one.  The first one was written in Emacs Lisp but it was
painfully slow on the hardware of that era.  The C version was
cumbersome by comparison.  If they wanted to get rid of the C version
now that the hardware is 100x faster or more, it's amusing that they did
a Perl rewrite instead of reviving the Lisp version.  Pandoc has a
significant user base now though, and it looks like it also supports
texinfo.  So I wonder what the new Makeinfo does that pandoc doesn't.
Maybe pandoc doesn't support Info?  That could be added, I'm sure.



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