Re: Transforming XML or other intermediate representation of Texinfo; category system

[Gavin Smith]

On Sun, Dec 12, 2021 at 11:00:12PM -0800, Robert Dodier wrote:
> Hi, I hope all is well with you-all.
> 
> Some time ago I cooked up a category system for Maxima. That was a
> success in the sense that it works as intended. You can see a random
> example: https://maxima.sourceforge.io/docs/manual/maxima_33.html Just
> scroll down a bit and look for "Categories: ...". Categories are the
> same as the tags that get stuck on, e.g., bug reports or Stackoverflow
> posts, etc. etc.
> 
> The bad news is that it's implemented as a terrible conglomeration of
> bash scripting and regex matching. I am thinking about ways to make it
> less terrible.

Interesting feature.  There could be some use for this.

The glibc manual tags definitions like
Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Safe | AC-Safe fd | See POSIX Safety Concepts.

https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Allocation.html

Another use could be to mark a definition as deprecated or to say which
versions of the software the definition is available with.  For example,
some glibc functions need _GNU_SOURCE to be defined but this is not
always clear from the Texinfo manual.

Supporting this officially might make it easier to have tags formatted
differently.  I like the name "tag" better than "category" as a
definition might have more than one.

Does anybody else have ideas as to what a definition "tagging" system
might look like?  Is it done well in other documentation?

It might be easier to implement this using the internal data structure
that represents the document rather than via modifying an external
format (XML) which then has to be read back into the program faithfully.
Patrice discussed this in his emails.  It depends on how much you are
willing to make sense of texi2any internals.