Re: cp -a --update

[Rik]

David Bateman wrote:
> John W. Eaton wrote:
>> On 11-Dec-2009, Rik wrote:
>>
>> | I'd also like your opinion on another simplification project I'm
>> | considering.  Currently the DOCSTRINGS file in the scripts
>> directory is
>> | generated in a most convoluted way.  The Makefile invokes mkdoc
>> which is
>> | a shell script.  The shell script is trivial and in turn calls a Perl
>> | program which it defines on the command line.  The Perl program then
>> | calls the C program gethelp.  The C program is being used for text
>> | processing to grab the Texinfo section from the .m files.  Given that
>> | Perl is extremely good at text processing and is a superset of any
>> | shell, I would like to collapse everything into a single Perl
>> script. | Are there any objections?
>>
>> I do agree that we could do better than the current solution.
>>
>> The original reason for the gethelp program was so that we would be
>> using the same code to extract help text as is used in the Octave
>> interpreter.  But the code there is just copied, so it may not be in
>> sync now.  I guess gethelp should really be linked with liboctinterp
>> and just use the internal functions directly.
I would prefer to move it out of C completely which I find difficult to
use for text processing.  Another possibility would be to defer the
creation of DOCSTRINGS until Octave has been built itself and then use
run-octave and a .m file in the same manner that we generate graphics
for the documentation.
>
> Please look at the mkdoc perl script in octave-forge that already
> performs this function
I took a look and this script would certainly work.

--Rik