Re: how to build emacs without documentation?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
> Date: Wed, 14 Aug 2013 12:49:09 -0400
> 
> > Because they implemented makeinfo in Perl, and made it a real
> > translator, that builds an intermediate parse tree representation, and
> > then invokes an appropriate back-end to produce output.  By contrast,
> > the original makeinfo was a one-pass converter which left most of the
> > text intact and just acted on the few directives, expanding them
> > in-line.
> 
> Still: parsing should be fairly trivial, and rendering to Info (almost
> plain text) shouldn't be all that hard either.

You'd have to ask the author to have definitive response, but my guess
is that it is not trivial at all to parse Texinfo.  The language was
never meant to be parsed, it basically is just a bunch of TeX macros,
i.e. it was meant to be macro-expanded, not parsed.  And the old
makeinfo did exactly that: it _emulated_ macro expansion, it didn't
parse anything.  And it did that inline, i.e. as it was scanning the
source.

> In comparison, "rm info/elisp.info; time make info" says that it needed
> 57s to make up the elisp.info file.  More than 10 times slower to do
> a simpler job.
> 
> There must be either something I'm missing, or some serious performance
> bug somewhere.

Look at the parser code, and I'm sure you will see it.