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Re: patch for gdb.texinfo


>
>    (Hi everybody!)
>
> Welcome back Stan!
>
>    Dmitry Sivachenko wrote:
>
>    > I think we should use new features of texinfo.  May be in future
>    > versions typeseting @env and @command will differ from the
>    > current behaviour.  By the way, FreeBSD team already updated
>    > texinfo to 4.0 in base distribution.
>
>    I disagree here.  We do have to worry about backward compatibility,
>    just as we had to support K&R compilers for a long time, and just
>    as we support many old OS versions.  Certainly many GDB users would
>    be disappointed if we trashed Linux support for any kernel older
>    than, say, 2.2.5!
>
> Well, it's slightly more complicated than that.
>
> It is standard GNU procedure to include the info files in the
> distribution.  So the user doesn't need makeinfo when building from an
> official release.  It is also standard procedure to include
> texinfo.tex in the distribution, thus for making a printed manual an
> up-to-date texinfo isn't necessary either.
>
> Thus someone who isn't actively hacking on package doesn't need texinfo at
> all.
>
> Cygnus might do things a little different.  Is GDB still distributed
> with texinfo included?  The CVS version suggests that this is the
> case.  Since the version in CVS is older than texinfo 4.0, using new
> features would not be very convenient!  Maybe it is time for an
> upgrade?  Because I think that if using new feature improves the
> markup we should try to use them.
>

Oh, I noticed /texinfo directory in your repository :).
Well, why not to upgrade texinfo there and use new texinfo commands---
no fuss, no muss...

By the way, this looks odd.  If everybody think that new commands
(@env and @command, in our case) are useless, we should write to
authors of texinfo and discuss it there.  But if these commands
do exist, why not to use them?  May be somewhere in the future,
they will be marked up differently, or W3C introduce new tag <ENV>,
which will be used when producing HTML output, etc.

--dima

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