Re: A replacement for Info

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

() Patrice Dumas <address@hidden>
() Wed, 15 Aug 2012 00:04:47 +0200

   > We mustn't forget the all-important address@hidden [froth
   > froth] !!!  I have been waiting a long time for that to be
   > runtime-tweakable...

   That is to be found in the tree, as it affects all the Texinfo coming
   after the @-command.  Some @-command affect the whole document, so
   would be available right at the beginning of the rendering.

   > This points to another subtlety of texinfo: IIUC the lifetime of a
   > variable or setting (or macro) is indefinite.  That is, if you
   > address@hidden a variable in 1.3.5.7 (a subsubsection in the first
   > chapter), that value will hold for all subsequent nodes (even 2.1,
   > i.e., higher level), until EOF or another address@hidden changes it.  This
   > means we need to record where such settings are done to know their
   > "span of influence".

   It is worse than that.  User defined macros and @value expansion may
   happen out of a balanced tree.  So these 2 constructs are expanded
   when constructing a proper tree in texi2any.  It should be possible
   to keep a 'mark' where they appeared (it is on the TODO list), but
   they cannot be kept in the tree like the other commands are, since
   the tree would not be a tree anymore.  If a generated sexpr tree is
   generated through makeinfo/texi2any, my idea is that the tree would
   have user defined macros and @value already expanded (macros
   definitions and @set would be in the tree, though).

I'm reviving this thread to point out some EXPERIMENTAL code that
hackers (familiar w/ Guile) might find useful for trying out ideas.
Here's the announcement to the guile-sources list:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-sources/2012-11/msg00007.html

Unfortunately IXIN 1.0 does not propose any solution to the "scope
dishonoring" nature of texinfo (c.f. "it's worse than that" above).
Maybe there's a way to specify that info either in the ‘meta’ section
(which already contains a good bit of "global" settings) or along w/
each entry in the ‘index’ section.  Hmmm.  Any thoughts?

-- 
Thien-Thi Nguyen ..................................... GPG key: 4C807502
.                  NB: ttn at glug dot org is not me                   .
.                 (and has not been since 2007 or so)                  .
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