Re: Minimum Texinfo version for creating the documentation

[Daniel J Sebald]

On 01/04/2018 01:48 PM, Mike Miller wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 04, 2018 at 09:26:16 -0800, Rik wrote:
> > Currently the minimum Texinfo version required for creating the Octave
> > manual is something ancient like 4.13.  Recent changesets use features from
> > 5.0 (Feb. 2013) and 6.1 (Feb. 2016).  These really improve the appearance
> > of the manual, but aren't necessarily available on ancient systems.  Given
> > that Octave creates the manual and distributes it in the tarball, is it
> > okay to bump up the required Texinfo to 6.1?  Developers on older systems
> > can use '--disable-docs' to concentrate on just the Octave core, or they
> > can compile and install newer versions of Texinfo.
>
> It would be helpful to continue to support Texinfo 5.2 at a minimum for
> now (Debian 8.0 and Ubuntu 14.04).

The easiest thing would be to put conditional statements around the 
command that controls the code

@ifWISHTHEREWEREVERSIONING
@codequoteundirected on
@end

and to define sortas() to be nothing

@ifWISHTHEREWEREVERSIONING
@macro sortas{param1}
@end macro
@end

https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/_0040ifset-_0040ifclear.html#g_t_0040ifset-_0040ifclear

https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/Defining-Macros.html#Defining-Macros

and those using old Texinfo will simply lose out.  Unfortunately there 
doesn't seem to be a means of getting the Texinfo version internal to 
Texinfo itself (I was unfamiliar with Texinfo up until a week ago).

So, we could somehow create and inject some definitions into the Texinfo 
configuration at the "configure" stage.  That is, we can get version from

"
linux@ ~ $ texi2dvi --version
texi2dvi (GNU Texinfo 6.1) 6991

Copyright (C) 2016 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later 
<http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
"

and based on the version number somehow add

@set NO_SORTAS_SUPPORT
@set HAVE_CODEQUOTEUNDIRECTED

to one of the Texinfo files.  (Should be an easy thing to append to the 
end of some file via some shell script like "cat".)

Then if in the Texinfo macro file we condition with

@ifset HAVE_CODEQUOTEUNDIRECTED
@codequoteundirected on
@end

@ifset NO_SORTAS_SUPPORT
@macro sortas{param1}
@end macro
@end

that should be it.

Dan