INN manual about inn HOT 1 OPEN

Comment by iulius on 27 Dec 2008 11:29 UTC

Julien ÉLIE
By the way, as for a possible texinfo documentation in the future, why wouldn't it be generated by pod2latex from existing documentation?
I believe the organization you have done in your website is quite good (introduction, developers, filtering, conf files, daemons, data files, etc.) and it could be used for the texinfo documentation.
The only missing stuff would be a little glue between the different sections and it could be achieved with an additional intro-*.pod for each section.

As a matter of fact, I do not think maintaining another documentation for texinfo only is a good idea. It is already hard enough to keep a documentation up to date! So the easiest thing I see is generating a texinfo documentation directly from existing POD files: for each section, a special overall introduction followed by the juxtaposition of existing manual pages.

Or perhaps do you have another idea?

Russ Allbery
The main reason for going to texinfo, which I thought of as a very long-term project, is that it's really a nicer language for writing a real, printable manual in than POD is. Unfortunately, the HTML output isn't always great, but it provides much better typographic control and the printed output is wonderful. It also provides chapters, indexes, a table of contents, and other things that are mostly a hack in POD.

If we went to texinfo, it would probably be as a comprehensive rewrite of the current INSTALL and checklist as a full-blown manual, keeping the man pages for detailed reference (since everything should have a man page in addition). I could see putting a lot of information about INN's internals into a texinfo document as well.

from inn.