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

[Joseph S. Myers]

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?

> I think it would be possible to change the manual so that you can
> build all the other version straight from the Texinfo sources,
> but this might reduce maintainability.  There would be two rather
> different ways to build the manual, the Texinfo markup would be a

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.)

> 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?

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm28@cam.ac.uk