Re: FYI: replacement for MODULES.html.sh

[Bruno Haible]

Paul Eggert wrote:
> MODULES.html.sh is so slow that I no longer run it and I expect
> that I'm not alone.

For this reason, Karl runs the script daily and publishes it at
  http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/MODULES.html

For me, that's enough of a fix, practically speaking.

> If Thien-Thi's fix works reliably on GNU development platforms,
> it would make sense to use it until somebody volunteers to come up
> with a nicer fix. 

I disagree: Thien-Thi's rewrite contains another copy of the parser for
module description files. Which increases the maintenance effort the next time
we extend the module description syntax. I don't want this; I prefer to have
the module description parser in a single place. It has the effect that a
single "./gnulib-tool --extract-filelist strerror" takes ca. 0.3 seconds.
If that is considered a big problem, then let's *move* the module description
parser to a different programming language (C for example - a language that
is fast and that everyone here knows well). But let's not *duplicate* it.
Code duplication is always a mistake.

Bruno