Re: [PATCH 1/4] ptsname_r: new module

[Jim Meyering]

Bruno Haible wrote:

> Hi Karl, all,
>
>>     > +MacOS X 10.5, FreeBSD 6.0, NetBSD 5.0, OpenBSD 3.8, Minix 3.1.8, AIX
>>
>>     Could you please break the line after a comma?
>>
>> I suggest using @tie{} between os (or program or ...) names and
>> versions.  That way the line breaks come out ok in both the source and
>> the output.
>
> Indeed, the result looks better (at least in HTML). I tested
>
> @item
> This function is missing on some platforms:
> address@hidden@tie{}10.5, address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden, 
> address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden, 
> address@hidden@tie{}2010-11, Cygwin, mingw, address@hidden, BeOS.
>
> But it reduces the readability of the .texi file, leading to two problems
> with the way I work currently:
>   - Often I point people to the newest .texi files in the repository,
>     because we update the documentation on www.gnu.org rather seldomly.
>   - Often I copy&paste between these .texi files and email.
>
> Hmm. What do the others think?

I find that the mark-up renders the texi less readable, and obviously
less copy&pastable.
Maybe it's just that I don't (yet?) have some Emacs texi-viewing mode
enabled that hides those @tie{}s.

However, I do recognize the value in better formatting.

Tough call.  I'm slightly in favor of adding the @tie directives.

>> Requiring manually broken source lines defeats M-x fill-paragraph.
>
> Basically I was explaining to Eric that he should not use M-x fill-paragraph
> on these paragraphs, because the result that M-x fill-paragraph produces
> makes it more complicated to do mass modifications to 500 files at once.
>
>> (Also, I suggest MacOSX or address@hidden instead of MacOS X, for
>> precisely the reason you cite.)
>
> address@hidden is fine with me *if* we decide to use it systematically.
> I wouldn't want to have half of the spellings be "MacOS X" and the other
> half "address@hidden".

We had similar problems with inconsistent OS naming in coreutils.
I enforced some measure of normalization with this syntax-check rule in cfg.mk:
(obviously, it too would have been defeated by a paragraph fill that
put OS name and version on different lines)

sc_sun_os_names:
        @grep -nEi \
            'solaris[^[:alnum:]]*2\.(7|8|9|[1-9][0-9])|sunos[^[:alnum:]][6-9]' \
            $$($(VC_LIST_EXCEPT)) &&                                    \
          { echo '$(ME): found misuse of Sun OS version numbers' 1>&2;  \
            exit 1; } || :