Re: Texinfo in descriptions?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Mathieu Lirzin <address@hidden> skribis:

> From e98c0ec3b609c077bf471cf838f12f54a89a0226 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: Mathieu Lirzin <address@hidden>
> Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2015 00:10:43 +0200
> Subject: [PATCH] packages: Add package-description-string.
>
> * guix/packages.scm (package-description-string): New variable.
> * guix/utils.scm (texi->plain-text): Likewise.
> * guix/ui.scm (package->recutils): Use it.
> * gnu/packages/perl.scm (perl-devel-globaldestruction)
>   (perl-devel-lexalias, perl-exporter-lite): Adapt to Texinfo's markup.
> * gnu/packages/python.scm (python2-empy): Likewise.

LGTM.

We must also make sure that the Emacs UI (and guix-web, but that’s a
different repo) use ‘package-description-string’ instead of
‘package-description’.

For Emacs, I think it’s enough to
s/package-description/package-description-string/ in guix-main.scm.
Alex?

>  5 files changed, 20 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)

I like that it’s all it takes.  :-)

Any performance figures?  For instance, time of ‘guix package -s’ before
and after?

> That was my first solution before realizing that this will lead to a
> problem that this unrealistic example illustrates.
>
>   ;; with fr_FR.UTF-8 locale
>
>   (package-description foo)
>   => "socks @code{foo}."
>
>   (package-description-string foo)
>   => "socks `foo'.\n\n"
>
>   (N_ (package-description foo))
>   => "chaussettes @code{foo}."
>
>   (N_ (package-description-string foo))
>   => "socks `foo'.\n\n"
>
> In the last evaluation gettext was unable to find the translated string
> corresponding to msgid "socks `foo'.\n\n".

What about moving ‘package-description-string’ to (guix ui) and have it
do both rendering and translation?

If an application really needs rendered-but-not-translated stuff, it can
always use (compose texi-fragment->text package-description); I think
that’d be an unusual use case anyway.

>> Also I think the same replacement should be done in (guix scripts
>> lint) ...
>
> I think more can be done in (guix scripts lint).  For example checking
> if invoking 'package-description-string' fails which would indicate that
> the markup is not correctly used.

Sure, we should do that after.

>> ... and (guix scripts package).
>
> This script uses 'package-description' to search in it.  IIUC it was
> suggested by Ludo to search using the raw Texinfo fragment and to
> display using the plain-text version.
> <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2015-07/msg00609.html>

Right, since ‘package->recutils’ uses ‘package-description-string’, we
know that all the output is correctly rendered and translated.

Nice work, thanks!

Ludo’.