Texinfo

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Robert J. Chassell writes:

 >     Texinfo is not as sexy as HTML

This really isn't a problem, because as you point out people can
automatically transform to HTML.  I don't know why people bring it up.

 > The format of Texinfo may be old,

This is a problem for acceptance by developers, and so somewhat
important.  However, it should be possible to automatically convert
(eg) reStructuredText to Texinfo as well as vice versa.  (You might
have to design an appropriate dialect of reST, but it's designed for
that.)

The real problem with Texinfo, however, is that it is a markup
language whose translator is a *compiler*.  This is not well suited to
online resources, whether wikis or help facilities built into
programs.  Contribute a Texinfo interpreter to Python, and you might
have an attractive proposition for the Bazaar developers.  But without
that, you would have to preprocess the Python source; it couldn't be
used as written (if the help strings were in Texinfo).  This is a
nonstarter.

I think a better alternative would be to keep Bazaar documentation in
a dialect of reST (or other suitable structured text) and provide a
docutils writer to produce Texinfo from that.