On 8/22/2025 3:01 AM, Marc Chantreux wrote:
Neither has strong support for generating documentation in the other format. Sphinx treats both as first-class "citizens".On Thu, Aug 21, 2025 at 08:08:51PM +0100, Stephane Chazelas wrote:2025-08-21 09:00:26 -0500, Bart Schaefer:As long as I can type make info; info -f Doc/zsh.info what happens before that is not hugely important.Same here, anything that can't produce info and, at least asWell … if textinfo is important, then why not just write in textinfo which is also a rich documentation format?importantly, with the same (or better touch that would be hard) quality of table of contents and index as we curently have with yodl would be a non-starter for me.Both mandoc and texinfo are capable here.
Maybe texinfo can be interesting because man pages becomes sections of a whole "zsh documentation" entity so there will be no more zshall. I really love the way perl and zsh handle things (the main man is the index of more thematic mans) and AFAIS(aw)
I frequently find it hard to use and default to zshall. "What was the name of that sub man page again?" "Which of these two sub man pages would have the information I'm looking for?"
Man is good for reference on small single use programs. It struggles with large programs or languages. Not that I'm saying we should abandon it for zsh, it's too integral to the environment, but it's not really the ideal documentation format for the program.
* lot of people just don't use info * most just don't know it exists * the ergonomy of the info command is terrible * info is pleasant just for people who installed emacs or vim plugins.I'm not a great fan of Python, but, like Thanos, it is inevitable.unlike Thanos: * it's here for bad reasons (mostly active lobbying at the time when the unix culture was mostly ignored)
Python was one of the early adopters of micro-service architecture and has object-oriented programming as a primary paradigm. Both of those are very much in the spirit of Unix. Do one thing and do it well. It also appears to be the language of choice for implementing modern AI techniques.
I hate that it has whitespace syntactically significant, I find the lack of block delimiters to make an otherwise easy to follow language a little more difficult to read, and I wish it had a native compiled format, but every language has its drawbacks.
I took a long time to warm up to python because it was different in may ways from the languages that came before, but I eventually accepted it wasn't going away. And if I wanted to stay competitive in the job market, I needed to get familiar with it. My many years of perl experience was not going to get me a job.
Eventually it will go the way of perl and eventually COBOL, but until then, it has its purpose. Right now it is a highly marketable skill.* it can be defeated.
regards