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Re: patch for gdb.texinfo
- To: dima at Chg dot RU
- Subject: Re: patch for gdb.texinfo
- From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz at delorie dot com>
- Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 02:25:15 -0500 (EST)
- CC: kettenis at wins dot uva dot nl, shebs at shebs dot cnchost dot com, dima at Chg dot RU, gdb-patches at sourceware dot cygnus dot com
- References: <200001301814.VAA59965@netserv1.chg.ru>
- Reply-to: Eli Zaretskii <eliz at is dot elta dot co dot il>
> By the way, this looks odd. If everybody think that new commands
> (@env and @command, in our case) are useless, we should write to
> authors of texinfo and discuss it there.
These new commands are not useless, they were introduced for very good
reasons.
What I was questioning was not the commands themselves, but the
complete replacement of @code/@samp into @env/@option in the GDB
manual, just because the new commands are there. AFAIK, no other GNU
manual has done such a total replacement. Even the docs of the
Texinfo package itself does not replace the old commands with the new
ones, although in that case, you could say that there's no reason why
it shouldn't: after all, the docs are generated when the package is
built (Texinfo is special in this aspect), so the new features are
*guaranteed* to be supported.
I think the transition should be somewhat slower. My experience
suggests that back-compatibility is important, and should be broken
only when necessary. In this case, it is not necessary (IMHO).