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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2012 19:43:46 +0200
> From: Patrice Dumas <address@hidden>
> 
> On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 08:02:34PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > 
> > "makeinfo -E" was never used too much, so I'm not surprised.  It is
> 
> I have no information about that, however I guess this was useful when
> used as part of texi2dvi -e, -E, --expand as TeX has many
> limitations/bugs in macro expansion.

Macros never worked well with TeX, so -E was a band-aid that not
always worked.

> > also a problematic concept, because the choice of things it expands as
> > opposed to those it leaves alone is such that cannot possibly work in
> > some use cases.  Here, "work" means that passing the results of -E to
> > makeinfo should give you the same output as running makeinfo once
> > without the -E.
> 
> Do you have an example?  I think I get the general idea, but I can't
> find an example.  Maybe this has to do with @if*?

Yes, @if* are the problem.

> > > I think that this behaviour isn't correct and I would prefer not to
> > > have it in texi2any.
> > 
> > Which behavior you allude to here, exactly?  The one with -E or
> > without?
> 
> The behavior I allude to is the fact that the 2 output (with -E and
> without) are not consistent.

If that can be fixed, it would be a good thing.  OTOH, if the new
macro expansion machinery will work well with TeX, perhaps -E could be
deprecated altogether.