more about build-index+cl-ppcre branch & encodings


On Mon, 7 Mar 2011, Robert Dodier wrote:

< On 3/5/11, Leo Butler <l.butler at ed.ac.uk> wrote:
< 
< > I've patched that, and a few things Ray mentioned in this
< > thread. I now see what appears to be the correct characters
< > for both encodings and all languages and lisps in clisp, cmucl
< > and sbcl and on both an xterm and gnome-terminal (debian testing
< > & ubuntu 10.04 less cmucl).
< >
< > To be clear, with revision b5805315e8 in a freshly cloned
< > repo, I execute:
< >
< >  ./bootstrap && \
< >  ./configure --enable-sbcl --enable-clisp --with-default-lisp=sbcl \
< >  --program-suffix=-post-5.23 --enable-all-lang && \
< >  make && \
< >  cd tests && \
< >  perl ./rtest-build-index.pl -verbose=1 -run_rtest_build_index=true \
< >  -lisps=sbcl:clisp #:cmucl
< 
< Works for me, 

That's good to hear.


< but I had to update makeinfo (texinfo package)
< to 4.13, which generates UTF-8 characters when the
< documentencoding is UTF-8. (Makeinfo from texinfo 4.11
< generates ASCII approximations such as c, for cedilla.)
< 
< I'm not too crazy about updating makeinfo.

I don't know: Makeinfo 4.11 is 3.5 years old and 4.13 is 2.5
years old. I think it is reasonable to expect folks to have
reasonably up-to-date kit.

< I suspect the
< existing Makefile machinery in doc/info/* which calls recode or
< iconv after generating ISO-8859 maxima.info files is a
< workaround for the inability of pre-4.13 makeinfo versions to
< actually generate UTF-8. 

< Maybe instead of fudging the
< documentencoding in maxima.texi, we could
< s/coding: iso-8859-1/coding: utf-8/ in maxima.info* instead.
< That would make the declared encoding match the actual
< without requiring an update for makeinfo.

I'll look into this possibility.

< 
< I like the idea of using a Lisp-based system to generate the
< help index, although I'm not convinced that the extra gyrations
< to explicitly track the encoding for an ordinary Maxima
< session are an improvement. (It is necessary to track the
< encoding when generating the indices since the maxima.info
< files have different encodings.)
 
 I think that there is a better way to do this,
 while still making it possible to set the encoding
 and generate index files from different info files.
 I'll see what I can do.

 Leo

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