Re: [PATCH v4 0/5] manual: Header & Standards Cleanup

[Zack Weinberg <zackw@panix.com>]

On 05/19/2017 05:33 AM, Rical Jasan wrote:
> There exists a convention for annotating which headers and standards a
> given function, variable, etc., provided by the glibc come from,
> guaranteeing their automatic inclusion in the Summary of Library
> Facilities, where they are indexed along with their headers and
> standards.  The convention is based upon expectations present in
> summary.awk, though that script does not do any enforcing, merely
> indexing what it can find.  It is roughly:
> 
>   @comment HEADER(S)
>   @comment STANDARD(S)
>   @(def|item|vindex)
> 
> It would be nice to use something other than ad-hoc @comments for such
> annotations, and also provide a framework for ensuring annotations
> exist and are correctly formatted.  To that end, a new set of macros
> are proposed: @standards and @standardsx.
> 
> Examples of intended use are:
> 
>   @item FOO
>   @standards{STD, HDR}
> 
>   @defvar BAR
>   @standards{STD1, HDR1}
>   @standards{STD2, HDR2}
> 
>   @deftypefun foo
>   @deftypefunx fool
>   @standardsx{foo, STD, HDR}
>   @standardsx{fool, STD, HDR}

Very high-level question: why can't this third case be

    @deftypefun foo
    @deftypefunx fool
    @standards{STD, HDR}

or, when foo was in C89 but foof/fool were added in C99 (for instance)

    @deftypefun foo
    @deftypefunx foof
    @deftypefunx fool
    @standards{STD1, HDR}
    @standardsx{foof, STD2, HDR}
    @standardsx{fool, STD2, HDR}

That is, @standards sets the default for the entire @deftypefun{x}
group, and then @standardsx can override specific cases if necessary.
This should make at least some @deftypefun{x} groups less repetitive.

> This patchset uses a script to convert existing @comment-based
> annotations to @standards.  First, the script is submitted for review,
> then the @standards* macros are added to macros.texi.  Next, a number
> of fixes are applied to various syntax issues and then the conversion
> takes place.  Lastly, summary.awk is replaced by summary.pl, in order
> to generate summary.texi from the new @standards.

I appreciate your providing the conversion script, but I'm not sure it
should be checked in.  Are we ever going to use it again after this
process is complete?

I do not feel qualified to review Perl code; I haven't used the language
for anything nontrivial in many years.  Because of this I am not going
to review your patch 1 or 5.

> In order to provide insight on the differences between summary.awk and
> summary.pl, and how @standards will differ from the @comment-based
> annotations, some analysis of the immediate and expected long-term
> differences follows.

I also appreciate your providing this analysis and I think temporary
omission of certain entries from the summary files is fine.  I'd like an
answer to the above very high-level question before we proceed with the
conversion, though.

zw