Re: Implementing notrans_man_MANS

[Peter Breitenlohner]

On Wed, 5 Mar 2008, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:

> Well, here's a review of your patches.  If you have time to address the
> comments, that would be great, otherwise I will eventually do it.

Hi Ralf,

I will go through your comments and think most of them pose no problem. For
the moment just a few remarks/questions:

> This triple loop is already at 72 iterations.  Not good for performance.
> If this grows further, we may have to access variables in a different
> manner here.

I assume you are worried by the total number of 72 iterations, not by the
fact that they come from three nested loops.  Given the Automake
infrastructure (to the extent I understand it) I see no alternative.

> > +?NOTRY?        l2='%NOTRZ%'; \
> > +?NOTRY?        for i in $$l2; do \
> > .......
> > +?NOTR?   $(INSTALL_DATA) "$$file" "$(DESTDIR)$(man%SECTION%dir)/$$inst"; \
> > +?NOTR? done
>
> Note to self: should rewrite the above when applying the multi-file
> install.

What is multi-file install? Maybe I don't need to know.

> Also, the whole thing would probably be a lot more readable if the
> ?NOTR?/?DOTR? prefixes vanished and were replaced by full rules, wrapped
> in `if %?NOTRANS_MANS%'.  That would be a better name for NOTR, and
> since it would then only appear a couple of times, it could be longer
> without pain, too.

I have tried to wrap the make rule fragments by something like
`if %?XXX%' but failed, maybe I got the syntax wrong.  However, from
some comments elsewhere I concluded that at present this is not possible.

Do you mean something like:
        install-man: install-man1 install-notrans-man1
        install-man1: trans_DEPENDENCIES
                trans_RULES
        install-notrans-man1: notrans_DEPENDENCIES
                notrans_RULES

That should not be too difficult. Shall I try it?

> > address@hidden must be specified first when used in conjunction with
> > +either @samp{dist_} or @samp{nodist_} (@pxref{Dist}).  For instance:
>
> Can this limitation be lifted (without making the code much slower)?

I wouldn't know how, and there is an analogous limitation elsewhere:
nobase_dist_pkgdata_DATA

> > +./configure --program-prefix=gnu- --prefix `pwd`/inst --mandir `pwd`/inst/man
>
> Please quote instances of `pwd' for the master testsuite.

Like --prefix "`pwd`"/inst for Windows paths containing spaces? I just
copied this from transform.test. A quick grep shows there are still plenty
of unquoted pwd's around.

BTW: Which one is better: `--prefix PREFIX' or `--prefix=PREFIX'?

==================

In the meantime I have some ideas how to handle manpage translations. Mainly
an Autoconf/Automake macro and Makefile.am stuff, plus a little bit of help
from Automake.  To whom should I send this, when finished to write it up?

Regards         Peter