> From: Rupert Swarbrick <rswarbrick at gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2013 22:36:39 +0000
>
> Jaime Villate <villate at fe.up.pt> writes:
> > Oh yes, Rupert. That's the cause of the problem. I have built version
> > 5.31.3 in two machines with different
> > versions of Ubuntu and it works fine in the one that has texinfo 4 but
> > fails in the one with texinfo 5
>
> Right. I think I'll try and resurrect the stuff I did with a lisp info
> parser a few months ago. It completely stalled because I didn't have a
> Windows machine to test it on, but now Broadcom have given me both a job
> and a laptop, so I might have a bit more luck this time...
>
> Rupert
Maybe we should re-think the info system. IIRC, there have been at
least 3 significant revisions in the last 3-4 years, none of which
were incorporated into master. I think that the stumbling block in
each case was testing on different combinations of os+lisps.
Here is a thought: Emacs' info-mode has its own info parser that
assembles the information needed. Since maxima-index.lisp is packaged
with Maxima, some small amount of elisp hacking would let us use
info-mode's tools to create maxima-index.lisp.
The advantage of using Emacs' info-mode is that the Emacs' developers
have a significant vested interest in making info work and fixing
problems (encoding, changes in texinfo, cross-platform issues, etc.)
promptly.
My suggestion would be to replace the existing Perl build_index.pl
with a bit of elisp code to run the relevant bits of info-mode and
export the data structure in a format suitable for maxima-index.lisp.
Users of Emacs might want to chime in on how good info-mode is in
dealing with Maxima's info files. In my experience, barring minor
hiccups, under debian linux info-mode has weathered the changeover in
texinfo very well.
Finally, I am not proposing to discard the work(s) done on CL info
parsing. These could be incorporated as share packages that extend
Maxima.
Leo