Re: patch for gdb.texinfo

[Mark Kettenis <kettenis at wins dot uva dot nl>]

   Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 09:08:52 -0800
   From: Stan Shebs <shebs@shebs.cnchost.com>

   (Hi everybody!)

Welcome back Stan!

   Dmitry Sivachenko wrote:

   > I think we should use new features of texinfo.  May be in future
   > versions typeseting @env and @command will differ from the
   > current behaviour.  By the way, FreeBSD team already updated
   > texinfo to 4.0 in base distribution.

   I disagree here.  We do have to worry about backward compatibility,
   just as we had to support K&R compilers for a long time, and just
   as we support many old OS versions.  Certainly many GDB users would
   be disappointed if we trashed Linux support for any kernel older
   than, say, 2.2.5!

Well, it's slightly more complicated than that.

It is standard GNU procedure to include the info files in the
distribution.  So the user doesn't need makeinfo when building from an
official release.  It is also standard procedure to include
texinfo.tex in the distribution, thus for making a printed manual an
up-to-date texinfo isn't necessary either.

Thus someone who isn't actively hacking on package doesn't need texinfo at
all.

Cygnus might do things a little different.  Is GDB still distributed
with texinfo included?  The CVS version suggests that this is the
case.  Since the version in CVS is older than texinfo 4.0, using new
features would not be very convenient!  Maybe it is time for an
upgrade?  Because I think that if using new feature improves the
markup we should try to use them.

Mark