Re: CVS Texinfo fails to build the Autoconf manual (from git)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2012 18:43:17 +0200
> From: Patrice Dumas <address@hidden>
> 
> On Tue, Jul 17, 2012 at 06:44:31PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > > Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2012 10:19:15 +0200
> > > From: Patrice Dumas <address@hidden>
> > > Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden
> > > 
> > > My wild guess is that this strange behaviour of makeinfo in C is a
> > > result of the order of expansion that happens by chance, and is not 
> > > intended.
> > 
> > No, it's intended.
> 
> You mean that it is intended that the comment is removed as part of the
> user defined macro expansion?

Yes, AFAIR using the comment is a common trick to prevent a newline
from being emitted after the macro.

> Once again the difference is not on keeping or not the end of line, as I
> showed with the examples done with makeinfo in C which do remove the end
> of line.  The difference is the order of comment removal with respect to
> macro expansion.  This change will break existing uses in subtle ways.
> I could try to provide with a backward compatibility mode in which
> comments are removed when expanding macros bodies, but I doubt it is
> worth it.

Well, Eric explained the issue clearly: there's a need to have some
form that will work with minimum fuss with both C makeinfo and the new
one.  If, for some reason, keeping backward compatibility is not
possible or unreasonable (although, I don't see how it can break
things), then you should tell how to change the Texinfo sources to
work OK with both versions.