Re: Autoconf for CRM114 fun and games

On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 1:49 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia <[email protected]> wrote:
> who've dealt with autoconf and CRM114 in the wild. Joost? If you're
> still around, I'd love your comment.

See for Joost's activity and current presence the ChangeLog in the CVS
repository for crm114 at sourceforge. Besides that, check his own
website. Says it all.


> * Does *ANYONE* use the GNU regexp version of CRM114? I'd hate to bother
> building it if no one is using it and testing it.

Not me and given the amount of sound around here, I'd say you'd be
safe to ride on a TRE-only requirement.

Had the intention to make it all support multiple regex libs when I
took up the autoconf work from Joost back in '07 -- have been using
multiple regex libs with other packages anyway -- but never got around
to it. TRE is very nice and still way faster than other stuff which
supports the mandatory subexpressions, such as pcre.
And then, there'd be the 'regex compatibility' between them all. Stuff
like 'to escape my braces or not to escape my braces', 'can I do
'[a]{3,5}' or can I not?'.
Multiple regex libs makes it all quite Shakespearean on a whole
different level, script-coding wise. :-)
So yeah, TRE mandatory? Go for it.


> * Is there any reason to have separate manual pages for "crm" and
> "crm114"? I can see keeping the "crm" binary name, because people's
> scripts use it. But it's easy to put in a crm.1 manpage that says ".so
> man1/crm114.1".

Pffft. crm is a softlink to crm114.


> * This zoem tool that Joost used to generate manual pages from
> templates. It's interesting, but does not succeed on my current (Ubuntu)
> platform. Was it really that helpful? Or should I just pitch its use as
> something that was popular for a while and has fallen away, and write
> raw nroff compatible man pages for reference document generation? Or
> should we continue to *bother* with man pages, and simply dump the
> vanilla documentation in /usr/share/doc/crm114/, which is in fact the
> easiest of all?

zoem? Probably chosen because the platform Joost was doing most of his work for.
Not my thing. Personally, I like the modern approach of using the
DocBook standard to write documentation, but granted, conversion to
the various output formats can be a bit of a bother at first.
Then there's of course the old 'n tried way of writing bare-metal nroff.
But if you _really_ like to make the GNU guys swoon (not me, I'm way
past that point already), one would of course consider nothing else
but TexInfo. (Which is great, and hail TeX!, but it's just that /info/
is not my cup of tea, 's all.)


> Does anyone feel attached to the use of $Id$ or CVS? Joost, if you're

Attachment/feeling: ze. ro.



-- 
Met vriendelijke groeten / Best regards,

Ger Hobbelt

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