Re: Autoconf for CRM114 fun and games

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 4:34 PM, Ger Hobbelt <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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.

Not quite: it doesn't show whether he's still tracking it privately,
or interested in doing so. I'm finding his code much easier to follow
than yours.

>> * 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.

Got it. I thought you had already done so, from its availability in
the configure.ac, but I hadn't tested it. Integrating PCRE is an
intriguing concept, but I'm afraid that due to the distinctions in the
various regex.h files or their equivalents, it would be safer to
continue to compile distinct binaries.

>> * 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.

Yeah. That's pretty straightforward to package, too. Anything other
than TRE would be 'crm114_pcre' or whatever regex people like.

I did notice a whole *set* of regexp variants: did you have any reason
to consider anything other than TRE and PCRE when you were looking at
this?

> 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.

Or plain old filename.txt, which is what Bill uses, and leave it in
/usr/share/doc/crm114/. I've personally lost much of my interest in
writing documentation format of the week throughout my career, and
find nroff to be unfortunately unstable among various platforms using
antique SVR5 nroff, groff, or who knows what.

> 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.)

Yeah, I like the results because of the time people devoted to
organizing it, but it's basically an old form of hypertext with
built-in search capability as far as I'm concerned.

>> Does anyone feel attached to the use of $Id$ or CVS? Joost, if you're
>
> Attachment/feeling: ze. ro.

Anyone else? I'm using git right now, and am generally pretty happy
with it. It beats the *tar* out of Subversion for remote access
performance and allowing you to clean up discarded lines of
development by scrubbing branches away.

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