Re: Yodl has been discontinued for 13 years... zsh still uses it for texi docs?

[Peter Stephenson <pws@xxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 5 Aug 2008 13:46:31 +0300
"Mihai Criveti" <cmihai@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I've had some issues building ZSH from CVS on AIX. Turns out it doesn't
> build zsh.texi, which requires yodl to build.

We supply zsh.texi in released versions for this reason.

> http://www.xs4all.nl/~jantien/yodl/ says it's been discontinued for 13 years
> now.. (4 years in 1999 when that page was last updated).
> 
> I'm also having a hard time finding the thing on any ftp mirror (it's been
> taked down). Finally managed to track in down in a Debian repo.

There was version 2 a few years ago, but that seems to be fairly stalled as
well.   See http://freshmeat.net/projects/yodl/

> Is there a specific reason zsh doesn't move to texinfo or something or is
> there an updated version of yodl around (I've failed to find one).

The specific reason in the case of texinfo (which I realise was only an
example) is that it doesn't create ordinary manual pages, without which the
documentation is unusable.  That's why zsh.texi is a target file rather
than a source file.

The only major more general reason is that, even if we found a suitable
replacement, at the current level of participation it looks incredibly
unlikely that anyone would ever volunteer for the level of work involved.
It would require fully implementing and the documentation converting before
we started using it.

Quite possibly it would actually be less work to grab Yodl 1.31.18 and
produce maintenance-only releases of that.  I don't think it's very
OS-dependent.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@xxxxxxx>                  Software Engineer
CSR PLC, Churchill House, Cambridge Business Park, Cowley Road
Cambridge, CB4 0WZ, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070