[darcs-devel] darcs patch: (mostly TeXnical) changes to the documentation

[David Roundy]

On Sat, Sep 17, 2005 at 09:30:23PM +0200, Andres Loeh wrote:
> > I think so far the shell prompt is probably mostly arbitrary, but using
> > different prompts for root and non-root seems like a good idea.  Or one
> > could use # for root...  :) Actually, I am thinking that probably $ isn't a
> > good choice, since it can be mistaken for part of an environment variable.
> > So I'd lean towards either % always or % for non-root and # for root.  I
> > think that % is conventional for csh while $ is conventional for a bourne
> > shell prompt?  I don't know.
> 
> Yes, I think that # is conventional for root, % for csh, and $ for bourne
> shell. I'd lean towards #/$, but don't mind to use #/%.

I don't feel strongly either way, either.

> > But perhaps a shell environment that adds the prompt for you would be the
> > best idea.  (Although that would require verbatim package hackery beyond my
> > skill level...)
> 
> For verbatim, that's relatively difficult, and I'm not convinced it's worth
> the trouble ...

Sure.

> > > * For the LaTeX version, what sorts of packages can be included?
> > >   Does it have to be possible to compile it with any ages-old
> > >   LaTeX-installation? The configure script certainly doesn't check
> > >   whether the LaTeX installation is sufficient.
> > 
> > Hmmm.  Adding configure checks on the latex installation does sound like a
> > good idea.  I definitely don't want to require "extra" packages to be
> > installed by users, but anything that's included in the default tetex
> > package which is in debian stable would probably be fine to use.  My
> > practical criterion for "ancient" is something that's older than debian
> > stable--usually it's a pretty good definition.
> > 
> > I see that in your patch you do some latex "if" trickery.  That sounds like
> > a good idea, if it allows us to work without a package if it's not
> > available.  On the other hand, if one can work without a package, one
> > wonders why one need use it in the first place...
> 
> Prettier results :) Of course, always do without nearly all
> packages, but you'll not get the same result.

Okay, that makes sense.

> > Do you have autoconf experience? Would you *want* to add checks for latex
> > packages?
> 
> I have a bit of autoconf experience. I can see what I can do. Of course,
> if someone else has suitable macros around, that would be very welcome.
> 
> I guess that darcs distributes the formatted docs in the binary
> distributions, and this is only relevant for the source distribution,
> right?

Right.

> > > * Related: preprocessing darcs for HTML currently produces a
> > >   file darcs.tex that cannot be processed by TeX (this is still
> > >   the case, I haven't fixed that yet). As a consequence, there's
> > >   no .aux file available for latex2html, which means that you
> > >   don't get section numbers when pointing to other parts of the
> > >   document ...
> > 
> > Hmmm.  Although I like latex very much, I dislike working on this sort
> > of business (specifically, formatting and making latex2html produce
> > decent html output).
> 
> I'm not particularly fond of latex2html myself, but I think that the
> specific situation I described above can be changed. I think if we'd
> change preproc.hs to do only the really necessary things, and do the
> rest from within TeX, the result might be slightly cleaner.

I don't much care for it either, but haven't found a better option.

> > Definitely, if your patches aren't going to commute, put any potentially
> > controversial ones last, so we can apply the safe ones easily.  
> 
> Is there an easy way to check this, i.e., can I list the dependencies
> of a patch explicitly?

Alas, no, there's no easy way to check dependencies.  That's been requested
as a feature, but I don't see a nice interface for it.  (I'm sure one
exists, but I just don't see it.)  For now, you can try a darcs command
such as send to see if you'll be allowed to send one patch without another
(with -o /dev/null, if you don't want to actually send emails).  Or you
could experiment with pulling from one repo to another.  Which are both
hacky ways to determine dependencies... :(
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net