Re: On being web-friendly and why info must die

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Lennart Borgman <address@hidden>
> Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2014 04:20:31 +0100
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>, Stefan Monnier <address@hidden>, 
>       Emacs-Devel devel <address@hidden>
> 
> > Yes.  Texinfo isn't the best language in the world, but you can make
> > drive-by contributors just write plain text, and it's OK.  And
> > maintainers can mark up things properly.
> 
> Drive-by contributors could perhaps write in org-mode? That is pretty
> easy to learn. (And conversion to texinfo is probably easy, or already
> there.)

They can write in pretty much _anything_, as long as the result is
close enough to plain ASCII.  Adding Texinfo markup is easy (I did
that myself a few times in documents of medium size), and could even
be automated if it becomes an issue.

This is not a real barrier (it could be an imaginary one).  The real
barrier is (a) a general tendency among software developers to shy
away of writing documentation, and (b) the fact that writing good
documentation needs a few skills that require practice to acquire.
As a kind of carrot, I can tell that good software developers that can
also write high-quality documentation are very valuable out there, so
if someone has a career on their mind, this is the place to polish
those skills with minimum overhead and for free.