Re: Generating config stuff from single source

Am Donnerstag, 16. Februar 2006 02:50 schrieb Tom Lane:
> That's fine for users, but what new demands are you about to place on
> developers? Does this require tools not already needed in order to
> build from a CVS pull? (There's sure no xsltproc on this machine...)

It is to be expected that sooner or later we'll move from SGML to XML
documentation builds, at which point xsltproc will become a semi-requirement
anyway. I don't think this requirement is too onerous; libxslt is portable
and easy to install.

> The m4 idea seems attractive to me because that's already effectively
> required as part of the autoconf infrastructure (and I think bison
> uses it too these days).

That is true, but I'm afraid that this will lead to code that only a few
people will be able to maintain. (Try programming a loop in m4 to start.)

> A similar issue that's been bothering me for awhile is that it'd be a
> lot less error prone if keywords.c and the keyword list productions in
> gram.y were generated off a common declarative source (which might as
> well produce the keyword documentation appendix too).

That could be a job for m4, I think.

--
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/