Re: how to build emacs without documentation?

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> 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.  Yet, makeinfo is
significantly slower than running the same file through TeX to get
a beautiful PDF.

E.g. "cd doc/lispref; rm elisp.pdf; make pdf" took me 16s first time
(because it had to generate some auxiliary font data, apparently) and 4s
second time around.

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.


        Stefan