Re: Special characters in doc strings of GDB commands

[Jim Blandy <jimb@codesourcery.com>]

Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org> writes:
> On Fri, Jan 19, 2007 at 01:36:56PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> I see in cli-decode.c:print_doc_line that it displays the first line
>> only up to the first comma or period.  However, I don't see this
>> special treatment of these two characters documented anywhere, neither
>> in gdb.texinfo (where it matters for doc strings given to user-defined
>> commands), nor in gdbint.texinfo (where it is important for GDB
>> developers who add new commands).
>> 
>> Am I missing something?
>
> Not as far as I know.
>
>> Btw, should we have a mechanism to escape these special characters, at
>> least the comma?  Sometimes a sentence looks very awkward or even
>> unclear unless you use a comma.
>
> Isn't this whole mechanism horribly i18n-unfriendly already?  Perhaps
> we should just change it...

My understanding is that the first line should be a self-contained
summary.  If there is additional text on the first line, it should be
moved onto the second line.  Then, print_doc_line could stop at the
line break.