Subject: Re: bug#53316: 28.0.91; Missing Transient manual in Emacs

From: Glenn Morris <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2022 04:27:27 -0500

My summary would be:

Transient is an Emacs library developed externally to Emacs.
A copy has now been added to Emacs for Emacs 28.
(I assume there is no intent to move development to Emacs.)
It has a manual written in Org format.
The Texinfo file is automatically generated from that Org source.

Originally the Transient manual was not in Emacs at all.
Now the generated Texinfo file has been added to Emacs, but not the
original Org source.

I previously reported a similar case as
  Subject: bug#45143: Missing source for some doc/misc manuals?
for the manuals for Org and Modus Themes.

You commented in several messages in Feb 2021, such as
  Message-Id: <[email-masked]>
  Message-Id: <[email-masked]>

Since the generated transient.texi file was added to Emacs, it has been
manually edited, because, as was already known, Texi-generated-from-Org
isn't as good as hand-written Texi.
(I assume there is no intent for the upstream Transient to switch its
manual from being written in Org to being written in Texinfo,
in the same way that neither Org nor Modus Themes did.)

To resolve bug#45143, I implemented Make machinery in Emacs to generate
.texi files for those manuals from their Org sources. (Sadly these changes
were not included in Emacs 27.2, so that release does not IMO
include the preferred form for the Org manual.)

Apparently generating transient.texi from transient.org requires some
changes to Org itself, which currently only exist in upstream Org, not
in Emacs master or release branch. So it isn't possible to generate the
texi file for this package with just the Emacs sources.