Re: Trouble with texinfo-multiple-files-update

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hi, Eli.

On Sun, Jun 02, 2013 at 06:42:00PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Sun, 2 Jun 2013 12:14:19 +0000
> > From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>

> > Then I come to update the main menu in the top file emacs.texi.  I was
> > unfortunate enough to try out C-u M-x texinfo-multiple-files-update.
> > This has loaded 44 .texi files needlessly into my Emacs

> This command updates the master menu by looking at all the nodes in
> the manual.  Since the manual consists of 56 files, how do you want
> Emacs to be able to update the master menu without visiting all those
> files?

By successively visiting them in temporary buffers and then killing them.

> The command also updates the top-level menu in each file, again
> something that is impossible without visiting them.

Yes.  I would prefer a command that Does One Thing And Does It Well,
simply creating the main menu from the existing entries in the other
files.  There's no harm having an option to update those too, though.

> > marking almost all of them as "changed", though I suspect these
> > "changes" are all null.

> Why do you care about the fact that they are modified?  Emacs does
> that elsewhere, e.g., when you "M-q" in a paragraph that is already
> filled.  You don't become nervous then, do you?  So why here?

I'm not so much nervous as irritated - I've got to deal with 54
"changed" buffers, otherwise they'll be hanging around my desktop
forever.  And I don't want to save them, since that will overwrite the
files' timestamps.  I eventually killed them with C-k (54 times) in the
buffer-menu and had to answer `yes-or-no-p' (also 54 times)

> > So now I've got the hassle of getting rid of these 44 "changed" buffers,
> > when all I really wanted to do was update the main menu.  It would have
> > been less work just to update the main menu by hand.

> I hope it's not too late to convince you not to "get rid" of these
> buffers.  Instead, save them all, and then invoke "bzr diff".  I'm
> sure you will see that only things that need to be changed actually
> did.

Yes.  I'm sure I would.

> > Why is there no decent command to update the main menu?

> There is, it is called texinfo-multiple-files-update.  You will see in
> emacs.texi that it was actually used on the manual, because there's a
> comment there which tells you what NOT to do to avoid screwing it up.

> > What do other people do when they want to update the main menu?

> texinfo-multiple-files-update.

I think, for a small change to the main menu, I'll just do it by hand
next time round.  It's less typing.  Obviously somebody (Glenn?) will
regenerate the whole menu whilst doing a release, and that seems to be
what texinfo-multiple-files-update was designed for.

> P.S.  We seem to have this kind of conversation every few years; e.g.,
> see http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=2975.

:-).  That thread had disappeared over my memory horizon.  But at least
it wasn't about texinfo-multiple-files-update.

Thanks for the reply.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).