admin/make-manuals

[Eli Zaretskii]

This is the first time I'm using this script.  It said "Making manuals
(slow)...", and then nothing else for about an hour(!).  Looking in
the manual/ directory it created, I see a single manual -- Emacs -- in
a single format, whose last file was created 7 minutes after the
script started.  Then it seemed to sit doing nothing, but using up
100% of the CPU.

I added some diagnostic printouts to the relevant functions in
admin.el, and watched them with "tail -f" (btw, why is the script by
default so silent about what it does? it isn't good karma for slow
scripts, IME) -- what I see is that manual-html-fix-index-2 is stuck
in this loop:

        (while (not done)
          (cond ((re-search-forward "<tr><td.*&bull; \\(<a.*</a>\\)\
:</td><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td><td[^>]*>\\(.*\\)" (line-end-position) t)
                 (replace-match (format "<tr><td%s>\\1</td>\n<td>\\2"
                                        (if table-workaround
                                            " bgcolor=\"white\"" "")))
                 (search-forward "</td></tr>")
                 (forward-line 1))
                ((looking-at "<tr><th.*<pre class=\"menu-comment\">\n")
                 (replace-match "<tr><th colspan=\"2\" align=\"left\" \
style=\"text-align:left\">")

It is stuck there because none of the branches of 'cond' inside the
loop matches.

Am I doing something wrong, or is this a bug in admin.el?

I couldn't regenerate the manuals as part of Emacs 27.2 release, as
result of this.