Re: [patch] Share options between info and man page

Pedro Alves
2014-07-08T09:47:49Z

On 07/07/2014 04:26 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> Frankly, I just don't know what to do with this patch.
>
> I don't know enough Perl to judge the texi2pod.pl patch, and don't
> intend to learn Perl just for that purpose.

I didn't know about texi2pod.pl until Mingjie's patch, nor did I
know we had it in the tree under etc/. Looking around, AFAICS, the
file is maintained in GCC, as indicated in its header:
"# This file is part of GCC.". 'git log' also shows entries like:

Move from gcc:
...
* texi2pod.pl: Import latest version from GCC.

GCC's version has a few changes from 2010 that our copy doesn't have.

I think we should start by updating our copy from gcc/upstream.

And then the etc/ patch should be sent to gcc-patches@ (CCing gdb-patches@).

Mingjie, would you like to champion that?

> On top of that, this
> whole "produce man pages from Texinfo" business was sold to us on the
> assumption that "it makes maintenance simpler" (see
> https://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-patches/2013-02/msg00290.html and the
> discussions around it). To me this means that we put a bunch of
> telltale markers into the Texinfo files, add a few Makefile rules, and
> promptly forget everything we knew about that.
>
> But now it sounds like this arrangement is not simple at all, that we
> need non-trivial changes to follow (which will probably stump someone
> at some point, and perhaps even be changed and break the man-page
> generation), we need to maintain texi2pod.pl, and whatnot else.

I found some documention on texi2pod.pl here:

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/Man-Page-Generation.html

Sounds like we actually want '@table @gcctabopt'.

> So I'm beginning to doubt that this is for the better.

I think the benefits once this is in place outweigh the hurdle we're
going through. I'd rather have a synced man page with the occasional
odd formatting (that gets fixed eventually) than having to keep
the two texts in sync manually.

--
Pedro Alves