Re: Current trunk fails to build on MS-Windows

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 23:45:04 GMT
> From: address@hidden (Karl Berry)
> 
>     A bigger obstacle to changing texindex than the requirement for gawk
>     4.0 is understanding TexiWeb Jr, as well as Texinfo and awk. 
> 
> I guess I'm not the best person to comment, but for anyone who has
> exposure to the concept of literate programming at all, or is willing to
> take the source at face value, it seems self-explanatory; hardly an
> obstacle at all.

With all due respect, that's really far-fetched.  As you and Aharon
know, I fulfill the above requirements, and yet wading through the
code took some time until I found my away around it.  The Awk code
uses quite a few new advanced Gawk features, like arrays of arrays,
asorti, multiple BEGIN/END blocks, etc.  On top of that, some of the
code is in jrtangle/jrweave, some in ti.twjr, and some in the
Makefile.  On top of that, the various patterns used by
jrtangle/jrweave are complex, and not documented in human-readable
English, so sometimes it's hard to understand where does the code take
this or that fragment.

I'd say much more "literacy" (i.e. user-friendly documentation) will
be needed before this will pass as "self-explanatory" in my book.

> (Understanding all the crazy mallocs and data structures in
> texindex.c was a much bigger obstacle in practice, for me anyway.)

We've been doing that for years, so what was once crazy no longer is.

(I'm not saying we should go back, just that your view above is overly
optimistic IMO.)