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

[Joseph S. Myers]

The following reply was made to PR ada/5907; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: "Joseph S. Myers" <jsm28@cam.ac.uk>
To: Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>
Cc: <gcc-gnats@gcc.gnu.org>,  <gcc-bugs@gcc.gnu.org>,  <brosgol@gnat.com>
Subject: Re: ada/5907: The Ada front end lacks a proper manual
Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2002 11:50:36 +0000 (GMT)

 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