Hello all,
I spent much of the Easter weekend (and a bit) in Sussex getting frozen
and blown inside out, but I also spent some time working on an
incremental version of the info file loading code that I'd been
pestering everyone about.
It now just loads both the top-level file ("maxima.info") and the last
file (for the index) when you first use "?" or "??" and then pulls in
extra files as needed. This is somewhat faster, by maybe a factor of
two, and won't slow down as the info document gets bigger. I presume
this is something like what the /usr/bin/info browser actually does.
I've spent a very frustrating few hours running the code on various
implementations with the documentation in various languages and, despite
Texinfo and GCL's best efforts, it seems to work now.
Grab it from the "parse-info" branch.
The info file loading is intentionally brittle, throwing an error
whenever it can't quite sort something out. This has worked well: it
turns out, for example, that the current Perl script doesn't load nodes
with a subsubsection number. There's no way I'd have noticed that if it
wasn't for my code falling over whenever something looked odd. I can't
make it error any more though, so I thought I'd ask others if they'd be
willing to have a go :-)
QUESTIONS FOR ANYONE INTERESTED:
- Is this fast enough for you?
(Note: I'm going to discount everything you say unless you give
timings; see the commit message for bf24391137 for one way to get
some)
- Does this break for you?
(I'd be astounded and upset, but I'd like to know and fix it! :-))
I'd be particularly grateful if someone could check this works on
Windows and/or Mac. There's no reason it shouldn't, but I haven't tested
that.
If no-one reports breakage, I intend to merge this to master at the end
of the week or so (unless another developer tells me not to).
Rupert
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