Conditionalizing the GCC documents

[Stan Shebs]

Bill Cox 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.
> 
> Would such a patch set be welcome for the 3.1 branch?

The GDB manual used to try to do this, but we scrubbed it out
a couple years ago.  The problem was not unlike that of that
conditionals in C source - unless you have somebody continually
testing that each combination of ifdefs still works, the
conditionals quickly bitrot and become unusable.  You can also
get into some very twisty situations that are beyond Texinfo's
ability to handle, and you have to replicate sections of text
just to get them to appear in the correct context for each
combination of conditionals.

And after all that, if you're successful, you'll end up with
a manual that purports to be the "GCC Manual", but is actually
a subset that doesn't mention what has been left out.  A subtle
form of censorship, in a way.

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.

Stan

PS I don't like that the gas manual does it either...