Re: Question about some fields in regex's re_pattern_buffer

[Karl Berry]

    two real arguments in favour
    of regex.texi are:
      - It less Makefile rules to use it directly, and regex.h changes rarely
        enough.

These days, I agree with that.  I think the simplicity of having the doc
not be generated outweighs the automatic sync-ing.  (Back in time, Kathy
and I were actually changing regex.h a lot, so the automatic sync made
sense.)

  - Debian people may have a legal problem if they have to generate a

And more crucially for GNU, rms may have a problem too / require extra
hoops / whatever.  I no longer want to venture to guess his reaction to
any doc/code combination, after having been thoroughly confused by a
recent gcc scenario.

In any case, having the manual under GFDL and the code under LGPL is the
desired state of affairs for GNU, and is a no-brainer if there is no
automatic generation, so let's do it that way.

> Supplementary question: in regexprops-generic.texi, I think that
> having a plain English definition of the various syntaxes obscures the
> fact that each is defined as a strict combination of features. Would
> you be happy if I rewrote the manual as English documentation of each
> feature plus a simple list (possibly automatically generated from
> regex.h) of which features are present in which syntax?

Sounds fine to me.  James can decide if he wants to pick up that version
for findutils or keep using regexprops ...

Thanks (and sorry for the delayed reply),
Karl