Re: Documentation question

[James Youngman]

On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 1:02 AM, Reuben Thomas <address@hidden> wrote:
> I've volunteered to help get GNU regex documentation into gnulib.
> Bruno Haible pointed me here because of one of my suggestions which
> potentially affects findutils. I wrote:
>
> "in regexprops-generic.texi, I think that having a plain English
> definition of the various syntaxes obscures the fact that each is
> defined as a strict combination of features. Would you be happy if I
> rewrote the manual as English documentation of each
> feature plus a simple list (possibly automatically generated from
> regex.h) of which features are present in which syntax?"

I'm not sure the two options need to be exclusive.

In any case, the current documentation is machine-generated by a C
program in findutils.   You might want to download it; this should
help you get some more specific ideas about what you propose to
change.

> I understand from Bruno & Karl Berry that you use a version of
> regexprops.texi, so I was wondering what you thought. If you have
> strong feelings against my approach, I'd be interested to hear, and if
> you agree, I'd be keen to see if I can get a version you can use into
> gnulib so that it's not necessary to maintain two copies of the same
> documentation.

I'd certainly be happy for this (the code and the output docs) to live
upstream in gnulib.   Currently gnulib is upstream of findutils for
everything except this file.    That doesn't really present any
problems, but it's a bit odd.

James.