Re: Conditionalizing the GCC documents

[Laurent Guerby <guerby at acm dot org>]

Gerald Pfeifer wrote:

> (The crucial question for me, wearing my GCC maintainer hat, is ``How
> does the FSF version of GCC benefit from such a change''?)

The ability of someone operating entirely on a GNU system
not to have to store and skip each time he/she is reading the manual all 
the info about
how broken proprietary systems are and what GCC does to
workaround their various problem.

Right now we have no way to produce a GNU documentation that does
not talk all over the place about proprietary systems.
Is it really what we want? As a RTEMS newbie user I might not want
to see piles of stuff about VxWorks just the stuff for my RTEMS target, 
so an option
to remove/select what I want is welcomed.

Also the ability of someone who is dedicating his/her time
to one architecture supported by the GNU system to have a tailored manual.
The GNU as developpers felt this was important,
may be we could follow their choice, or at least ask
their reason, and what were the maintenance costs and issues if any.

Same reasoning to get a readable manual for a limited set of 
architecture (ie
GNU/Linux and BSD on x86 and PowerPC).

It looks like someone is volunteering to provide
some useful work to the GCC project, as long as an easy "include all"
flag is set by default and the conditional system is general enough
and not VxWorks only I don't see on what ground we should reject it.

However, no strong opinions (at work we've been asking our
vendor for a long time to provide one manual with all our
platforms and not a manual per platform with one paragraph
difference amongst 200 pages :).

-- 
Laurent Guerby <guerby@acm.org>