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Comment by dark-star | Hacker News Reader

> This new one makes mention of at least C11

Indeed, I haven't spotted these on my first glance over the document. So yeah, it's probably only 10-15 years late when it comes out. I'm still amazed that RMS is taking C11 into account, I would have guessed he prefered C99

> Nothing wrong with software being old. It's stable and reliable.

I'm sure you're having fun driving your old Ford Country Squire, watching television on an old RCA TV set and using a rotary phone to call friends and family ;-)

Of course you are right in that there is nothing inherently wrong with using old software. And yes, it might be more stable than the shiniest newest tech. But there are middle grounds that exist as well that get you nifty features or quality-of-life improvements, and don't intimidate newcomers that much than having to first find out what that CVS is that GNU is still using in some areas ;-)

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> I'm sure you're having fun driving your old Ford Country Squire, watching television on an old RCA TV set and using a rotary phone to call friends and family ;-)

I said software. Have you stopped using 30 year old Linux, Python, Photoshop, etc.? They're not that much newer than Texinfo. Or do you think they should be discarded when they hit 40? MS Excel is about the same age as Texinfo. I guess Excel is obsolete now.

You don't need to make a whole new product to introduce improvements in software like you do with hardware.

Improvements happen in discrete steps, for hardware the same as for software.

If you build a new car by taking an existing one and swapping out the engine, is it still the same car? What if you also swap the body. And the drive train?

The same is true for software. In Linux, almost everything has been swapped out"from what it was 30 years before. Device drivers, Memory manager, you name it. Is it still the same old Linux? Probably not. Just because the name didn't change doesn't mean it's the same product.

However, take a look at what changes have been done in GNU Make in recent years. Other than a few bugfixes there was nothing of substance. GNU TexInfo? the same. This is what I mean by "old". I get the whole "never change a running system" thing, or "when it works exactly like it should, why change it"... But this is a surefire way to make sure your software is lost and abandoned when the last 2 developers working on it quit.

> However, take a look at what changes have been done in GNU Make in recent years. Other than a few bugfixes there was nothing of substance. GNU TexInfo? the same. This is what I mean by "old".

There's a clear scope. It makes sense to only have bugfixes, specially since it's FOSS.

> I get the whole [...] "when it works exactly like it should, why change it"...

Why complain about it then?

> But this is a surefire way to make sure your software is lost and abandoned when the last 2 developers working on it quit.

This is FOSS. You seem to think of this like for-profit software. Development in FOSS is typically done for the developer(s) own need and shared for free with the world on the off-chance that someone else finds it useful, because some people are cool like that. There's no for-profit incentive to make it as widely applicable as possible nor to retain market.

In the case of Texinfo, it's utility is mostly for development in the GNU space. It's essentially to write documentation once and turn it into nicely formed PDFs, single-page HTML, multi-page HTML, and info manuals, each with their format-specific functionality for table of contents and indices fulfilled. That idealizes their documentation for print media, web, and local access.

Do you have a use for that? No? Why do you care if it's lost and abandoned? Yes? Then contribute whatever it is you seem to think it's lacking.

Don't worry about loss of market. The only market developers owe anything to is themselves.

Love this drama ,as always

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