Re: [Texmacs-dev] Re: [TeXmacs] ANNOUNCE: texmacs-fedit plug-in

[Joris van der Hoeven]

On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 09:09:07AM +0100, Sam Liddicott wrote:
>>> As I said before, the main problem I see with literate programming is
>>> the fact that you have the choice between two evils:
>>>
>>>  1) Force all developers to use the same literate programming tool:
>>>     the TeXmacs documents become the actual source code.
>
> I'm hoping tmml will help here; a docbook <-> tmml converter will go  
> someway to avoid the problem - not that people will want to use docbook,  
> but it gives them a choice as well as a way out.

This does not really address the issue: docbook is nice,
but many developers will want to edit the ASCII source code.

>>>  2) Clobber the native ASCII source code with special comments which
>>>     contain directives for the literate programming tool.
>
> I'm planning to do this with a separate index file the relates key  
> points in the generated source, to the document; to act as a mediator  
> for a diff so that it can be shown which parts of the document need  
> updating so as to be able to generate the modified source.

Yes, I also plan to use indexing for this kind of thing,
but you still will have to clobber the ASCII source code with IDs.

>> So, I think TeXmacs will need to produce a text file or a collection  
>> of text files that are easily readable by a human, and so that edits  
>> to them can be brought back to the original document by TeXmacs.
>
> This bringing-back often involves re-factoring as a modified segment of  
> code may be an emitted meta-chunk that is emitted in many parts of the  
> project.

Yes, this bringing-back is *the* main problem on which one has to think hard.

> I closer problem is that of supporting multiple collaborators all of  
> which use texmacs - how easy is it for texmacs to support multiple  
> collaborators at the same time?

What is the problem?

> One light problem is automatic label name generation. If a label near  
> the front is removed and the document "update all" then label  
> re-numbering occurs causing a large diff for such a small change, and it  
> can be dreadful to merge git branches in such a case.

This is a minor issue, which is mostly due to your current way of
doing things. Notice also that you may wish to set the save-aux variable
to false in your preamble, as for the tmdoc style.

Best wishes, --Joris