Subject: bug#75638: [PATCH] Include various GNU manuals in info-url-alist

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2025 10:14:20 +0200

> Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2025 04:45:50 +0200
> From:  Björn Bidar via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs,
>  the Swiss army knife of text editors" <[email-masked]>
> 
> The patch adds various GNU manuals to the default value of
> Info-url-alist.
> I scanned https://www.gnu.org/manual/ for the manuals which could go
> into this list.

The canonical place that associates Texinfo manuals with the URLs of
their Web pages is the file util/htmlxref.cnf in the Texinfo source
tree.

I'm not sure I like this direction of extending Info-goto-node-web.
It was designed to support the Emacs manuals.  Adding all this stuff
to it takes us very far from that goal, and I'm not sure why would we
want that.  Proliferating use of HTML docs on the Web (as opposed to
local Info manuals) is not a goal I'd like us to pursue.

This also makes us responsible for keeping this list up-to-date, which
means we'd need to track the Texinfo's htmlxref.cnf file from now on.
A slightly better change would be to add a command that will process
htmlxref.cnf file (if it's installed in /usr/share/texinfo/) and
augment the value of Info-url-alist with the URLs found there.

I've added Stefan, Andrea and Juri to this discussion, and would be
interested to hear their opinions on this change.

In any case, if this is installed, the doc string of
Info-goto-node-web should also be updated, as it no longer goes only
to gnu.org Web server.  A NEWS entry is probably also warranted.

Thanks.