Re: macro bug in CVS makeinfo

[Karl Berry]

    comes up with a formal spec of macros that defines a regular grammar,
    with all the corners (like quoting and whitespace/newline handling)
    figured out as part of that.  How to do that without breaking existing
    manuals that are heavy users of macros, I don't know.

The only clean future I can envision is a new command, not changing the
existing (broken-by-design) @macro.

However, I have yet to see (or be able to devise) any design that can be
cleanly implemented in TeX.  There is a fundamental problem because so
much of Texinfo (not just @macro) is line-oriented.  Recognizing and
manipulating "\n" characters in C or Perl or whatever is no problem.
That is not even close to true in TeX.  Preprocessing sources with
makeinfo -E is not a robust solution either.

The current manual describes some of the edge cases and workarounds, FWIW.

k