Re: [help-texinfo] preferred way to change output for a macro

[Patrice Dumas]

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 05:29:29PM -0700, Robert Dodier wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 3:08 PM, Karl Berry <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > It's intentional that redefining a Texinfo command gives a warning.  The
> > idea is to use new names if you want different behavior, instead of
> > redefining existing ones.
> 
> OK, I guess, although that doesn't really seem consistent with
> the description of @var and similar macros. [1]

Could you be more specific?  I see nothing that implies that user
defined macros could redefine the indicating commands?

> >From what I remember, Texinfo 4 didn't give a warning about
> redefining @var. Has anything changed in Texinfo 5 that would
> affect how the macro works? (Aside from printing a warning.)
> Maybe it's just that the code and documentation were written
> by authors with different agendas?

Nope, documentation is synchronized with the code.

How macro expansion have changed between Texinfo 4 and 5, it is documented 
a bit in the NEWS file.  Regarding the indicating variables, I think that
nothing changed except for the warning.

We thought that a valid reason to define a user defined macro for a
Texinfo command was to cope with older versions not implementing the 
command.  For that we added support for doing code for backward
compatibility, documented in 'Testing for Texinfo Commands'
http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/texinfo.html#Testing-for-Texinfo-Commands

-- 
Pat