In my view the most important direction for the Texinfo project is to improve access to locally installed Texinfo documentation.
(Discussions about using HTML as a file format have been in this direction, but this is a difficult issue to make progress on.) One thing I think could have an immediate impact is to make it easier for users to find out how to install Info manuals if they don't have them installed. It has been a common experience for me after installing a GNU/Linux distribution on a new computer, and running something like $ info tar to get an unhelpful error message: info: No menu item 'tar' in node '(dir)Top' I might get the man page instead if one exists. Each time there is no assurance given that the manual actually exists, if only it is downloaded. If I know the manual exists, I can then hunt through the distribution package manager to find it, but I expect many users would not do this. One issue has been the Debian's policy on the GFDL being a "non-free" licence in certain cases, leading Info manuals not to be installed by default. Whatever the reason, I propose that there should be a way for users to easily bypass the distribution's decision not to install Info manuals. :-) Some related threads: "Improve access to documentation in Info format" (Suhail Singh) https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2024-12/msg00355.html "Info download service" (Gavin Smith) https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-texinfo/2024-01/msg00041.html Rather than build functionality into the "info" program to read data files listing online locations of Info manuals, or even to download files from the network (we are not turning Info into a web browser, to create the "Info web" to rival the WWW, after all), we could provide a simple "hook" that "info" could use if a manual is not found. Users could then install a package *once* to provide this hook for a particular distribution. It could be as simple as printing a message: tar not installed; run 'sudo apt install tar doc' to download and install The hook script itself would use a list of manual names and which distribution packages install them. This script would be maintained separately from the main Texinfo project. There could be different scripts for different distributions that would handle the vagaries of Info manual installation on each distribution, without this code having to be in the main source code for Info. This would be like the bash "command_not_found_handle" hook that is set by default on some distributions: $ xxx Command 'xxx' not found, did you mean: command 'xx' from deb fex-utils (20160919-2) command 'x2x' from deb x2x (1.30-10) command 'xxd' from deb xxd (2:8.2.3995-1ubuntu2.19) command 'xdx' from deb xdx (2.5.0-4) Try: sudo apt install <deb name> https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/command-not-found
