On 11-Dec-2009, Rik wrote:
| I'd also like your opinion on another simplification project I'm
| considering. Currently the DOCSTRINGS file in the scripts directory is
| generated in a most convoluted way. The Makefile invokes mkdoc which is
| a shell script. The shell script is trivial and in turn calls a Perl
| program which it defines on the command line. The Perl program then
| calls the C program gethelp. The C program is being used for text
| processing to grab the Texinfo section from the .m files. Given that
| Perl is extremely good at text processing and is a superset of any
| shell, I would like to collapse everything into a single Perl script.
| Are there any objections?
I do agree that we could do better than the current solution.
The original reason for the gethelp program was so that we would be
using the same code to extract help text as is used in the Octave
interpreter. But the code there is just copied, so it may not be in
sync now. I guess gethelp should really be linked with liboctinterp
and just use the internal functions directly.