Re: texinfo.tex indexing bug

[Karl Berry]

    As a hypothetical question, if I rewrote texindex in awk and it
    functioned as a drop-in replacement, would you take it?

I don't see why not.  It would surely be easier to maintain.

If you go that route, one thing I would really like to do is change the
.?? index files to use @ as the escape character instead of \.  So it
would be great if a new texinfo could accept either one, could simply
detect from the first line, I think.

I already changed the aux and toc, but not the index, precisely because
tinkering with texindex is not on my list of Fun Things To Do.

    If so, would you require fully portable awk, or could I take
    advantage of stuff that is only in gawk?

I wish I could say yes to gawk-only, but I think fully-portable is the
way to go.  Texinfo gets installed on old systems, I know to my sorrow,
and if it only worked with gawk (even old gawk), that would just raise a
furor.  Just don't want to go down that road.

Thanks,
Karl