Re: CVS Texinfo fails to build the Autoconf manual (from git)

[Eric Blake]

On 07/17/2012 10:43 AM, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> 
>>> In my opinion it is much better to have something consistent, and
>>> leaving the end of line out is also better in my opinion, otherwise it
>>> is not possible to have a macro expansion within a line.
>>
>> If this causes existing uses to break in subtle ways, then I disagree,
>> but I've been unable to convince you in the past.
> 
> Once again the difference is not on keeping or not the end of line, as I
> showed with the examples done with makeinfo in C which do remove the end
> of line.  The difference is the order of comment removal with respect to
> macro expansion.  This change will break existing uses in subtle ways.
> I could try to provide with a backward compatibility mode in which
> comments are removed when expanding macros bodies, but I doubt it is
> worth it.  It could be interesting to document that change, though.

What does this mean to the end user?  Autoconf needs to have a macro
whose expansion does not end with the current line, and where the manual
can be compiled with both old and new tools (that is, I do not want to
force autoconf development to upgrade to the latest texinfo just to
compile the manual).  If you subtly change semantics of the approach
autoconf is currently using, then you also need to document a construct
that will work for both old and new tools (even if that means defining
the macro twice inside some sort of conditional that determines which
tool and therefore which semantics will be encountered).  My preference
would be for preserving the existing semantics, so that the autoconf
manual does not have to change what it already has in place.

-- 
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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