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

[Robert Dodier]

On Sun, Dec 19, 2021 at 4:09 AM Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0123@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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

Yeah, it has that flavor, although an important feature is to be able
to follow a link to get to a list of all items which have been tagged
(all MT-Safe, all AS-Safe, etc.)

> 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.

Yeah, Texinfo already has a "category" concept which is different, so
it probably needs to be changed. "Tags" is a good choice, since that
term is used pretty widely for this idea.

> 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.

Yeah, the internal Perl structure is a possible way to do it. However,
I glanced at the structure for the document I'm working on, and it
seemed quite a bit more complex than the document itself. Maybe I
should take a second look.

All the best,

Robert