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

[Patrice Dumas]

On Tue, Jul 17, 2012 at 08:51:18PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > 
> > 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.

I don't see that in makeinfo in C, at least in 4.13.  Is it for
texinfo.tex macros?

> 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),

The result of this behaviour is that output of expanded output, say,
Info is different from output of texinfo with @macro expanded.  Using my
example, with makeinfo in C:

Info ->

      jj   gg  ll.

Texinfo (with -E) ->

    jj   gg @c ll.


I would label that as a bug in makeinfo in C, as the resulting texinfo
would not lead to the same Info if the -E result is reprocessed by
makeinfo in C to output Info.  I think that this behaviour isn't correct
and I would prefer not to have it in texi2any.

-- 
Pat