Re: ada/5907: The Ada front end lacks a proper manual

[Florian Weimer <fw at deneb dot enyo dot de>]

"Joseph S. Myers" <jsm28@cam.ac.uk> writes:

> On Sun, 10 Mar 2002, Florian Weimer wrote:
>
>> The VMS version requires substantial postprocessing (words are
>> replaced globally, file names are rewritten).  It is not possible to
>> express this in Texinfo.
>
> Why not?  If the standard manual needs the word "foo", where the VMS 
> manual needs "bar", why shouldn't a macro @foo{} (with different 
> definitions in the two cases) work?

We would need a couple of hundered macros, I think.  For example, the
preprocessing rewrites all strings like "hello.adb" to "HELLO.ADB",
"hello.o" to "HELLO.OBJ", and so on.  If you had to write
"@helloadb{}" and "@helloo{}", reading the sources would become rather
difficult.

> I don't think however the VMS way of building the manual would be of
> relevance to the FSF sources - I think having just one version, covering
> all systems, is generally preferred for GNU manuals.  (If it were done 
> simply by a VMS Texinfo conditional, it might still make sense not to 
> define that conditional when building the GNU manual on VMS.)

Of course, the preprocessed manual could be committed to the CVS. But
I doubt that this is a reasonable approach.

>> bit clumsy, and the TeX implementation of Texinfo doesn't handle
>> extensive use of conditional processing and macros very well.  On the
>
> What are the problems?

Macro expansion in index entries causes problems, and so do some kind
of conditionals (but these problems are more related to makeinfo,
IIRC).