Re: [PATCH 1/2] maint: new rule to update copyright year ranges

[Eric Blake]

On 01/02/2011 04:58 PM, Karl Berry wrote:
>> BTW, is there some reason why install.texi makes the nonstandard
>> formatting setting:
>> @firstparagraphindent insert
>> Personally, I think it would be better to take the default, just because
>> it's the default, though I can't say I'm too worked up about it.

>     It was added explicitly in Autoconf v2.62-95-g02fa53b for better
>     plaintext rendering, see:
>     http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf-patches/2008-08/msg00132.html
>     http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2008-08/msg00239.html
> 
> Well, sigh.  "better" here is an aesthetic opinion, not a technical
> argument.  I don't agree with that judgement, obviously, or the Texinfo
> default wouldn't be what it is.

> So, I'd like to go back to the gnulib Makefile approach, and eradicate
> @firstparagraphindent.  Ok with ... whoever cares?  Eric?

In other words, revert autoconf commit 02fa53b195 (which blindly added
the '@firstparagraphindent insert' for all non-autoconf rendering) and
partially revert gnulib commit 0a29fc2d83 (restore Bruno's gnulib-only
Makefile hack to add @firstparagraphindent when building INSTALL).  I
like the idea; and it makes it once again so that direct inclusion of
install.texi in some other non-autoconf manual no longer suffers from
non-default indentation, but that the gnulib generation of INSTALL from
install.texi still has the nice formatting appropriate for a short
plaintext file.

> As for autoconf/INSTALL syncing with gnulib (the point Eric raised which
> led to his change), seems to me you could equally argue that
> autoconf/INSTALL should match the style of the autoconf manual.  Anyway,
> you can get either way easily enough.  (We could conceivably generate
> both flavors of INSTALL in gnulib, which I don't object to, but don't
> care about that much either.)

Nah, I don't think both flavors of INSTALL are needed in gnulib.
There's a difference between including install.texi as part of a manual
(which is currently broken for all but the autoconf package), and
including the short file INSTALL in a package as a stand-alone file
(where the non-default indentation makes sense, given the file's
standalone nature).  In reverting the above patches (or patch portions),
I will also have to double-check that autoconf's INSTALL matches
gnulib's INSTALL (since autoconf directly generates its own INSTALL
rather than copying from gnulib, but it would look odd if autoconf's
INSTALL is different from other GNU packages).

Speaking of odd differences, I noticed that the latest round of
regeneration of INSTALL added some ugly artifacts:

-Basic Installation
-==================
+0.1 Basic Installation
+======================

How to we get gnulib's generation of INSTALL to drop those unnecessary
paragraph numberings?

-- 
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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