Re: Macro Format

[Braden McDaniel]

On Sat, 2005-01-15 at 14:21 +0100, Peter Simons wrote:
> Bastiaan Veelo writes:
> 
>  > My biggest concern is still that Guido's archive is not
>  > in sync with yours with respect to my macro. I am
>  > pondering the idea of using
> 
>  >   <m4source href="bnv_have_qt.m4">
> 
>  > maybe that helps.
> 
> The problem is that the macro won't contain the markup and
> documentation in the way Guido's software expects it to
> then. I'm not sure what would happen in that case.
> 
> As I see it, we have the following options:
> 
>  (a) Abandon XML altogether and go back to the @keyword
>      style of adding meta information. The HTML page
>      generated for your macro wouldn't look as good anymore
>      as it does now, but that's not exactly a major concern.
> 
>  (b) Commit a pseudo-macro in the legacy tree that tells the
>      user to go to www.gnu.org/.../bnv_have_qt.html for the
>      real thing.
> 
>  (c) Complete the re-organization effort that stalled a year
>      ago and thus unify the gnu.org and sf.net archives.
>      (Personally, I never thought it was a good idea to
>      duplicate all contents of this archive in the first
>      place, but that's a long story ...)
> 
> Have I missed something? Opinions anyone?

FWIW... I don't think I will ever submit a macro in the XML format. It's
just too much trouble while the doc-comment style of adding metadata is
so easy. It makes my life easier when the file I submit to you is
something that can be used by aclocal. If you're content to convert doc-
comments to XML because it's easier for you to manage the repository
that way, fine by me.

What if your software could generate a doc-commented version of the
macro from the XML? Perhaps that could give users something they could
diff against more easily.

BTW, my own practice has been to maintain my own repo for my macros and
simply submit them whole rather than submit patches to them. For me to
change from that to using ac-archive CVS as my versioning solution there
would have to be a convenient way for me to test my macros in that
context. I'm not suggesting you need to care about this; but in case you
do, there it is.

-- 
Braden McDaniel                           e-mail: <address@hidden>
<http://endoframe.com>                    Jabber: <address@hidden>