RefTeX Merge

[Ralf Angeli]

Hi,

for the last years RefTeX has been maintained in two separate
repositories: the one Emacs and the one of AUCTeX.  Since not much
development is happening with respect to RefTeX in the AUCTeX repository
I'd like to merge the changes from both locations now and then
discontinue the version in the AUCTeX repository.  That means the
version in the Emacs repository would then be the only place where
RefTeX is developed.

I'm now nearly finished with the task of merging the changes and I'd
like to discuss a few details before I check the changes into each
repository.

* ChangeLog information

  There is a lot of information about the changes done in each
  repository, namely the file history and the ChangeLog entries.  Is
  there a nice and easy way to preserve this information?

  I'd be especially interested in bringing the history of the standalone
  version of RefTeX to the Emacs repository, so that the changes of the
  last years can be retraced after the standalone version will be
  discontinued.  Unfortunately RefTeX does not have its own ChangeLog in
  the Emacs repository so I'm not sure where to put this stuff.  The
  commit log entry could be an option.  But I'm not particularly fond of
  it.

* Build infrastructure and standalone releases

  The standalone RefTeX has a lisp and a doc directory below the root
  directory where each location has its own Makefile for building and
  installing the program and the documentation.  There are also make
  targets for making a release.  I don't really plan to release RefTeX
  separately from Emacs after the version in the AUCTeX repositories
  will be retired but I'm a bit wary of throwing the Makefiles away.  So
  since they will not be needed in the Emacs repository I'll not move
  them over but probably do a final standalone release and have the
  whole code thereby archived on gnu.org.  Are there better ways to
  preserve such code?

* Version info in Lisp and Texinfo files

  The version and date strings for Lisp and Texinfo files of the
  standalone version is generated from the ChangeLog when make is run,
  so that it is always up-to-date, even for development versions.  The
  build process creates a reftex.el file with the version and autoload
  information and a version.texi file with the version and the date that
  is included in the main Texinfo file.  Is there something like this as
  well in Emacs?

  For `reftex-version' one could probably just use `emacs-version' but
  for the version and date info in the Texinfo manual one would need to
  pull in something like a version.texi file as well.

* Macros in Texinfo files

  The reftex.texi file of the standalone version uses macros for words
  like TeX, LaTeX, BibTeX and so on.  So there is e.g. @BibTeX{} instead
  of address@hidden  Can those be used in the Emacs repository as well?

Once the above questions will be clarified and there are no objections I
will go ahead with the merge and the files into the AUCTeX and Emacs
repositories.

-- 
Ralf