Re: Texinfo macros and m4

[Karl Berry]

    What about implementing a solution with luatex?  Would that work?

No.  I mean, sure, it could work for people using luatex, but
a) luatex will be a moving target for quite some time to come, and
b) a vanishingly small percentage of people use it, and
c) it would take quite a lot of development time to figure out what to
   do and then do it.  Processing through m4, OTOH, should be fine.

    Sounds reasonable.  However, if you do that, m4 *must* become part of
    TeXLive! 

Gee.  I totally disagree!  It is not TL's business to provide system
utilities.  The resulting conflicts are a true pain.  Even getting it to
build on our all platforms, in a way that works in the builders'
environments, would not be simple.  I'd remove texinfo.tex from TL
before I added m4 ...

    >   \input texinfo   @c -*-texinfo-*- `m4needed'
    Hmm.  Why not also using Emacs file variable syntax for indicating m4?

Simplicity/robustness of parsing?  I just want to grep for something to
determine if it should be passed through m4.
^\\input address@hidden'

People can do a lot of tricky stuff in Local Variable sections.  Heck,
just finding them is nontrivial.  Anything can be done, but ... the
simpler the better.

k