Re: Conditionalizing the GCC documents

[Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>]

Richard Earnshaw wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 26 Feb 2002, Stan Shebs wrote:
> > >> Our company wants to ship GCC docs only for the target architectures
> > >> that our customers use.  I'd like to submit to the gcc/*.texi files to
> > >> make the specific arch support conditional like the GAS manual does.
> > > So I'd like to put in a vote not to go down that path.  If it's that
> > > important to Wind River, then it should be possible for you to maintain
> > > this as a local patch.
> >
> > I thought about this, and came to the same conclusion as Stan, so I
> > believe this should be kept a Window River-local patch.
> >
> > (The crucial question for me, wearing my GCC maintainer hat, is ``How
> > does the FSF version of GCC benefit from such a change''?)
> 
> I wouldn't object to it being possible to do this, provided:
> 
> 1) It was possible to build a manual with all optional sections in it
> 2) The default was to do that.
> 
> That would put the onus on people wanting to make cut-down manuals to keep
> the optional parts consistent.

That was exactly what was done with the GDB manual.  But because
the GCC manual has lots of cross-references, the conditionals would
quickly proliferate, and the people wanting cut-down manuals would
have to be editing it all over the place.  In some cases, the
conditional machinery was inadequate (menus come to mind), and
so for GDB we ended up with multiple copies of things just so that
both arms of a conditional would work right.

Conditionals will add to the maintenance cost for everbody.

Stan