OPT_HANDLERS, Makefiles, and documentation

[John W. Eaton]

On 18-Apr-2011, Rik wrote:

| Something is not quite right in the Makefile for the src directory, and I
| can't pinpoint the issue so I'm writing you instead.
| 
| I recently updated mk-opts.pl at the top-level of the tree to change the
| Texinfo documentation string for the option handlers.  The updated
| timestamp mostly caused a rebuild of the affected files in liboctave/ and
| src/ expect for the '*.df' files associated with the OPT_HANDLERS.  The
| result is that the DOCSTRINGS file contains the old Texinfo information
| from the now out-of-date .df file.  To resolve the situation I had to
| remove the .df file and force it to be rebuilt.  For example, 'rm
| src/DLD-FUNCTIONS/quad.df'
| 
| One thought I had was that the entire auto-building and the use of
| mk-opts.pl could be junked in favor of ordinary source code checked into
| Mercurial.  Yes, if we found a typo it would need to be changed in 5
| places.  On the other hand, that seems easier than the current system
| involving sh, perl, and Makefiles and these interfaces are very stable
| since they are to legacy Fortran routines.

I would actually like to deprecate these *_options functions in favor
of option structures, so I'm not sure we should put too much effort
into revamping them just to deprecate them.  Doing this is one of my
personal goals for 3.6.

jwe