Re: Info download service

On Sun, Jan 14, 2024 at 10:13:14PM -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
> 
>   > That being said, even if it is only centralization of where to find
>   > manuals, any centralization is not ideal, but I can't see another way to
>   > do it.
> 
> Some centralization is important for reasons beyond convenience.  We
> need to give the community a centralized method of finding the
> official GNU manuals, and the translations whose translators we at
> least are in contact with.

Agreed.  But there should also be non-GNU manuals.  We can maintain a
list here in the Texinfo package, but I am not sure that it scales well.
Again, I do not have a good solution either.

>   > This is already possible to do that, most of the info manuals are also
>   > quite easily available from the web.  Of course there is still some work
>   > to do before making it easier, as we are discussing here, but in any case, if
>   > anybody wants to do that code, we cannot stop Distributions from using
>   > it.  I do not believe that it would be a code hard to do, so I do not
>   > think that whether we do it or not changes much the possibility of
>   > having only online info manuals.
> 
> Those words are alarming but vague.  They seem to say that some
> problems are impossible to prevent, but I can't tell what problems you
> mean.

I did not meant to be alarming.  I agree with Daniel that it is better
if manuals are installed locally (Info manuals today, maybe HTML manuals
with Info browsing capabilities tomorrow).  My point is that, if
Distributions do not want to have manuals installed locally, but provide
ways to download manuals instead, we can not do much against such
decision.  In particular, I do not believe that adding to Info readers the
possibility to download manuals to resolve links will particularly lead
to Distributions stop installing manuals locally and I do not think
either that refraining from providing this feature ourselves is a good
way to avoid Distributions stop installing manuals locally.

-- 
Pat