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

From: Richard Stallman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2022 23:34:39 -0500

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  > The original sources for this manual are in Org, but the program that
  > produces Texinfo from the Org original has problems that need to be
  > resolved before we can include the Org sources in the Emacs release
  > tarball.  The Org sources themselves also have several issues.

Thanks.  Now I understand the problem.

  > The current Texinfo sources in the repository were heavily edited to
  > solve many problems in the original version converted from Org to
  > Texinfo, and that is how we intend to distribute that in Emacs 28.1.

That's not a solution.  To distribute a compiled form of anything
without its real source code would violate our principles.
Furthermore, anyone who redistributes that Emacs release would
likewise be distributing a compiled form of this manual without its
real source code -- and since perse would not be the copyright holder,
that would violate the license.

We must not do that.  What could we do instead?

We could distribute this package without its manual.  That would be a
practical problem, but not a disaster.  It is a reasonable option.
But we have other options too.  Here are some ideas.

* Delete Transient from the Emacs 28 release.  People can get it from
  the separately released Org mode.

* Fork the manual, making a version for which the Texinfo form is the
  real source that we edit.  That version can be included in Emacs 28.
  This forkage would be a practical problem, but not a disaster.

* Write a converter to generate that manual's Org-format source from
  the Texinfo form.  Then the Texinfo form will be the real source
  code, and we can include it both in Emacs and in the Org release.
  This way, there will be no practical problem, only the inconvenience
  of editing that manual in Texinfo rather than some other source
  format.

I suspect that automatically converting Org format to Texinfo format
gives bad Texinfo output.  Texinfo has many different markup
constructs to make visual distinctions in the text.  Consider @samp,
@code, @kbd, @dfn, @emph, @var. @file, @url, and more.

How does Org format express those distinctions?  I fear the answer
is, "It doesn't."  I would be glad to find that that problem
has been fixed.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)