Re: Install munge-texi.pl for use by packages?

[Olaf Till]

On Mon, Jul 07, 2014 at 02:46:04PM -0400, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 07/07/2014 12:50 PM, Mike Miller wrote:
> 
> >Yep, exactly as Carlo said, no reason for duplication, if we can
> >replace this with an Octave script or function, it can also be used to
> >build Octave's own manual as well.
> >
> >I think these are great ideas, please file a wishlist bug on Octave to
> >replace munge-texi.pl with an equivalent Octave function that can be
> >used for both Octave's manual and for package manuals.
> 
> I'd like to be able to cross compile packages so that we can cross
> compile a complete Octave distribution that includes packages that
> are already built and ready to install along with Octave.  Will
> having this script as an Octave function make that job harder?
> 
> For example, we can't currently cross compile Octave directly from
> the mercurial sources because doing so requires running the copy of
> Octave that is being built in order to create figures for the
> manual.  And when doing a cross build, that doesn't work.  I suppose
> that making the munge-texi script an Octave function would make that
> problem slightly worse because then building would fail if you
> modified the manual sources, not just if you modified the source
> file for one of the figures.
> 
> If we do go down this path, then I suppose a solution for cross
> compiling would be to require that we build (or use, if it is
> already installed on the system) a corresponding native version of
> Octave that can be executed on the build system to generate the
> figures and perform the munge-texi step.

I didn't see first that munge-texi.pl uses DOCSTRINGS files generated
by mkdoc.pl. So either mkdoc.pl also would have to be converted to an
Octave function, or the Octave function for munge-texi should use
`get_help_text()' instead of DOCSTRINGS files. Intuitively I'd like
the latter better, but are the DOCSTRINGS files also needed for other
things? And using `get_help_text()' would require always to have the
_same_ Octave version locally installed for cross-builds, since the
help texts would be taken from the installed version ...

I'm probably not able to give a suggestion for this decision.

> If we are going to install this function somewhere, then perhaps it
> could just be an option for the pkg command?  I do agree that we
> should find a better name for it in any case.

I'd say it would be a working solution if pkg performed the munge-texi
step for all .txi files in the packages doc/ directory (and possibly,
before that, generated the DOCSTRINGS files) before it runs make, or
maybe even before it runs ./configure. (If you meant something like
this.)

Olaf

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