Re: [Qemu-devel] [PULL v2 000/180] QAPI patches for 2017-01-16

[Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>]

Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> writes:

> On 17 January 2017 at 12:08, Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com> wrote:
>> Right now, that'll make no difference whatsoever, because the programs
>> that choke on -D generate no output for the commands using the variable
>> defined with -D.  All they do is gripe.
>>
>> Three possible solutions, in increasing order of complexity:
>>
>> 1. Live with the warning from old versions.  If a new version comes
>> around that does something with @subtitle, it'll just work.
>>
>> 2. Suppress the warning with @iftex-hammer.  No change in output now.
>> If a new version comes around that does something with @subtitle, we
>> won't profit unless we take out the @iftex.
>>
>> 3. Replace -D by @set, either by preprocessing .texi, or by including a
>> generated snippet.  No change in output now.  If a new version comes
>> around that does something with @subtitle, it'll just work.
>>
>> My order of preference is aligned with decreasing complexity, i.e. first
>> 1., then 2., then 3.
>>
>> Please tell me what you want.
>>
>> If you want 3., I can certainly live with it, but I'd rather do 1. or
>> 2. now, to get my rather conflict-prone pull request in, then do 3. as a
>> follow-up patch.
>
> Yeah, I think it's reasonable to apply this now and then
> fix up the warnings afterwards, since they don't break the
> build. I'll do that.

Thanks!

> In terms of what I'd like for the VERSION issue:
>
> (1) if it doesn't actually cause a change in the output, we
> should either just delete the use of VERSION entirely, or move
> it to somewhere outside of @subtitle which does actually
> appear somewhere. There's no point in putting in the version
> info if it doesn't get into the final output, whether
> it generates a warning or not.

It does affect PDF output.  PDF is generated by texi2pdf, which uses
different command line options, and setting VERSION works fine there.

> (2) If we want to display VERSION then we need to use @set,
> it looks like.

We need to decide whether we want to display the information that is now
in @subtitle in makeinfo output in addition to PDF output.  If yes, we
need to put it somewhere else than the subtitle, and find a
bug-compatible way to set VERSION.  If no, we still might want to
silence the warning produced by old versions of makeinfo.