Re: Trouble with texinfo-multiple-files-update

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hi, Stephen.

On Mon, Jun 03, 2013 at 09:29:13AM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie writes:

>  > Then I come to update the main menu in the top file emacs.texi.  I was
>  > unfortunate enough to try out C-u M-x texinfo-multiple-files-update.
>  > This has loaded 44 .texi files needlessly into my Emacs, marking almost
>  > all of them as "changed", though I suspect these "changes" are all
>  > null.

> I suspect they're not null.  Based on my own experience, I guess what
> happened is that t-m-f-u hasn't been run in a while so there were a
> lot of updates.

The abstract principle here which hasn't been addressed is that
emacs.texi is not wholly a source file - it is partly a script generated
file.  It doesn't seem entirely clear who's responsible for running this
script, texinfo_multiple_file_update.  Having added a node to
search.texi, I feel responsible for also adding an entry for it to the
main menu - but NOT for updating every menu in every file in the whole
directory.  Doing the latter would make the commit message and ChangeLog
entries very cumbersome.

>  > So now I've got the hassle of getting rid of these 44 "changed" buffers,
>  > when all I really wanted to do was update the main menu.  It would have
>  > been less work just to update the main menu by hand.

> No, it wouldn't, because there's an excellent chance you'd screw up
> t-m-f-u and somebody would have to fix things eventually.

t-m-f-u, updating, as it does, every menu in the whole manual, is
clearly intended to be run as part of the release process, and this
surely gets done.  So such screwups would be fairly temporary.

In the end, I did just update the main menu by hand, though I haven't
yet committed the change.

>  > What do other people do when they want to update the main menu?

> t-m-f-u followed by C-x C-b.  In XEmacs, I can't sort on the mode
> AFAIK, which would be really convenient when I've got 100 other
> buffers open.

I don't think you can in Emacs either.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).