[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #49193] help slow because of makeinfo

[anonymous]

Follow-up Comment #5, bug #49193 (project octave):

I'm the one from the original report:
My timing was done on my home PC, which is an Intel Atom from 2010, which from
experience I know to be easily a factor of 5 slower than my i5 at work.
Sadly/fortunately, at work I have makeinfo 4.13, which formats the help text
in 0.008 s. 

Yes, already when I wrote the bug report, I compared the 30 minutes invested
by me to possible savings. And I think 10 hours to be a rather optimistic
estimate. And yes, I know that this would have to also track when user-written
functions are modified to reformat the help text the first time it is
requested, but the harder part of such a mechanism seems to be already in
place (ignore_function_time_stamp...).

But to me it seems that historically the largest part of free software coding
stemmed from personal irritations, and if J. Random Hacker each time would
have drawn up a business plan whether it is worth to set out implementing
anything, the tens of thousands of programs nobody but himself ever used would
not have been written (no problem there), but also not the hundreds that
enable us today to use a computer as a tool that feels like an extension of
the fingertips. So all that I intended with my post was (first) to document a
dirty solution to anyone that stumbles over the problem and does a quick
search, and (second) that perhaps somebody indeed thinks "Ah, now that I read
it, this is what has been irritating me all along!", and starts to work on a
better solution.

So yes, this is only wishlist, and if I got the help text in 0.2 s, I probably
would not have noticed the lag, let alone reported a bug. But seen from the
other side, I think that the texinfo people only reimplemented makeinfo in
perl, thereby sacrificing speed, because they assumed that the output gets
cached in the info files.  

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