Re: simple doc point

[Gavin Smith]

On Tue, Jul 12, 2022 at 08:32:42AM -0500, Eric Blake wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 09, 2022 at 07:26:10PM +0100, Gavin Smith wrote:
> > My preferred solution for this at the moment is to add a new command,
> > akin to @deftypefnnewline, which would toggle whether a space was
> > output after the definition name. It would be included in Texinfo
> > source files if required. This would be fairly straightforward to
> > implement. In texinfo.tex, the space is output in \defname, and this
> > could easily be made conditional:
> 
> Adding a new command to suppress the space after \defname sounds
> reasonable.  I'd be happy to test how that looks in the m4 manual,
> although I'm not a texinfo.tex expert to write such a patch myself.

With the patch below, you need to add

@clear txidefnamespace

early in the manual.  I checked briefly with the m4 manual source from
https://www.gnu.org/software/m4/manual/ and the results looked good.

This follows the pattern of a few other options being controlled with
@set flags with names beginning "txi", which allows it to be implemented
in an backwards-compatible way.

It would be easy to change the name of this option or to change it to
a @set rather than a @clear, if there was a better suggestion.

Once I get some feedback on this, I'll commit the change and start work
on making the change in texi2any.  I think this is a very important change
to make for the sake of m4 where the space is incorrect!

diff --git a/doc/texinfo.tex b/doc/texinfo.tex
index a2bcf60e49..c0e33f1780 100644
--- a/doc/texinfo.tex
+++ b/doc/texinfo.tex
@@ -7835,12 +7835,16 @@ might help (with 'rm \jobname.?? \jobname.??s')%
     \fi           % no return type
     #3% output function name
   }%
-  {\rm\enskip}% hskip 0.5 em of \rmfont
+  \expandafter\ifx\csname SETtxidefnamespace\endcsname\relax\else
+    {\rm\enskip} % hskip 0.5 em of \rmfont
+  \fi
   %
   \boldbrax
   % arguments will be output next, if any.
 }
 
+\set txidefnamespace
+
 % Print arguments in slanted roman (not ttsl), inconsistently with using
 % tt for the name.  This is because literal text is sometimes needed in
 % the argument list (groff manual), and ttsl and tt are not very