Re: [PATCH 2/2] gnu: Add GSSD and Pipefs services (Usage of @var)

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

John Darrington <john@darrington.wattle.id.au> skribis:

> On Tue, Sep 13, 2016 at 01:45:19PM +0200, Ludovic Court??s wrote:
>      John Darrington <jmd@gnu.org> skribis:
>
>      > +@item @code{nfs-utils} (default: @code{nfs-utils})
>                                          ^^^^^
>      Should be @var, because here we???re talking about the value of the
>      ???nfs-utils??? global variable.
>
> I think you are mistaken here.  Quoting from the Texinfo manual:
>
>     Use the @var command to indicate metasyntactic variables. A metasyntactic 
>    variable is something that stands for another piece of text. For example, you
>    should use a metasyntactic variable in the documentation of a function to 
>    describe the arguments that are passed to that function.
>
>     Do not use @var for the names of normal variables in computer programs. These
>    are specific names, so @code is correct for them (@code).  For example, the 
>    Emacs Lisp variable texinfo-tex-command is not a metasyntactic variable; it 
>    is properly formatted using @code.
>
> Or have I got it wrong?

Dunno, my interpretation is that ‘nfs-utils’ here denotes the value of
the ‘nfs-utils’ variable, so it “stands for another piece of text”,
which is (package (name "nfs-utils") …).

No big deal, but we should settle on a single convention and so far
we’ve used @var in such cases.

Ludo’.