Re: copyright notice for regexprops-generic.texi

[James Youngman]

On Nov 24, 2007 11:53 AM, James Youngman <address@hidden> wrote:

> I now notice that unfortunately the content of regexprops-generic.texi
> has significantly diverged from the (one time) original source, which
> is automatically generated by lib/regexprops.c in findutils.

This original contains some extra sections which are not useful in
regexprops-generic.texi, and some which are useful are in act missing.
 So I've updated the findutils code (the patch is awaiting code
review) to include a makefile rule for generating
regexprops-generi.texi as well.  Findutils doesn't use the file, so
it's not generated by default.

> This
> leaves me with a headache; which of the changes were intended to fix
> defects in the documentation (and thus need feeding 'upstream' back
> into findutils) and which changes are mainly editorial or intended to
> adapt the file for use in other projects?

Well, this turns out not to be so bad.   The changes were in fact
mostly the presence/absence of the sections I refer to above.  My
confusion was caused by the fact that the automatically-generated text
is quite self-similar and so the diff was slightly confusing.   So
while there are also editorial changes, they appear to be failrly
minimal and also appear to have been made by me.   I attach the
relevant patch.

> I find this tangle a bit frustrating since it's this kind of
> difficulty that gnulib exists to prevent.   Does anybody have ideas
> about how we could improve the situation ?   That is, how can we make
> fixing this a once-only effort?

Well, once I have applied the pending patch to findutils, I will
update findutils' "make check" to compare the regexprops-generic.texi
it generates with the one included in gnulib.   That extra automation
will take the manual work out of keeping this up to date.

2007-11-27  James Youngman  <address@hidden>

        * doc/regexprops.texi: change "an close-group" to "a close-group"
        and "illegal" to "not allowed".

regexprops-generic.patch
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