Subject: Re: bug#57108: Time to retire texinfmt.el

From: Stefan Kangas <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2022 05:25:03 -0700

Stefan Kangas <[email-masked]> writes:

> It seems like it does nothing that makeinfo doesn't already do better,
> and maintaining it separately from the texinfo project seems like
> duplicate and wasted effort.

I found it instructive to run `M-x texinfo-format-buffer' in
"doc/misc/org.texi", then `C-x C-s' to save the file "org.info", and
then run the following command from the command line:

    diff -u info/org.info doc/misc/org.info

This demonstrates that texinfmt.el would need *a lot* of work to produce
output that of the same high quality makeinfo.  It leaves things out
from the output, can't handle some markup, mishandles quote characters,
etc., etc.

Just to give an idea:

    diff -u info/org.info doc/misc/org.info | wc -l
    => 44325