Re: how to build emacs without documentation?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
> Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2013 10:51:51 -0400
> 
> As for "info", well, that was pretty much immediate until Texinfo-5.0
> came along.  So you might like to downgrade to Texinfo-4.x to enjoy
> a more normal speed.

I renamed the new makeinfo to makeinfo5, and keep the old v4.x one
under the name makeinfo.

> I still have no idea how they managed to slow things down so much.

Because they implemented makeinfo in Perl, and made it a real
translator, that builds an intermediate parse tree representation, and
then invokes an appropriate back-end to produce output.  By contrast,
the original makeinfo was a one-pass converter which left most of the
text intact and just acted on the few directives, expanding them
in-line.

> It feels like it's a good 100 times slower.  Actual measurement will
> probably show the slowdown factor to be smaller, but still the
> difference is insane.

The slowdown factor is around 18.