gmane.comp.shells.zsh.user

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

I've had some issues building ZSH from CVS on AIX. Turns out it doesn't build zsh.texi, which requires yodl to build.

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.

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).

Criveti Mihai
http://unixsadm.blogspot.com

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Peter Stephenson | 5 Aug 13:02

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

On Tue, 5 Aug 2008 13:46:31 +0300
"Mihai Criveti" <cmihai <at> boreas.ro> 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 <at> csr.com>                  Software Engineer
CSR PLC, Churchill House, Cambridge Business Park, Cowley Road
Cambridge, CB4 0WZ, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070

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Johann "Myrkraverk" Oskarsson | 5 Aug 13:29

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

Hi all,

On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 11:02 AM, Peter Stephenson <pws <at> csr.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 5 Aug 2008 13:46:31 +0300

> 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.

It isn't.  I built it for solaris (snv 77) recently and ran into some
build script issues.  IIRC nothing major.  It does require icmake
though, which was also similarly difficult to make.

I contacted the author, and the debian package thingy is the official
place for it, it seems.  I don't recall offhand where I got icmake,
but it isn't that hard to find with google.

Johann

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Mihai Criveti | 5 Aug 16:44

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

That was my issue with building yodl on AIX. I think I'm better off
rewriting the makefiles :-\.

Of course, I could just generate the docs on Solaris or some BSD and
move the Doc directory to the AIX machine. Anyone see any fault in
that reasoning?

From what I've seen this is already provided in the releases anyway
(as I didn't have the same issue building 4.2.7 or 4.3.7).

On 8/5/08, Johann Myrkraverk Oskarsson <johann <at> myrkraverk.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 11:02 AM, Peter Stephenson <pws <at> csr.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, 5 Aug 2008 13:46:31 +0300
>
>> 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.
>
> It isn't.  I built it for solaris (snv 77) recently and ran into some
> build script issues.  IIRC nothing major.  It does require icmake
> though, which was also similarly difficult to make.
>
> I contacted the author, and the debian package thingy is the official
> place for it, it seems.  I don't recall offhand where I got icmake,
> but it isn't that hard to find with google.
>
>
> Johann
>

--

-- 
Criveti Mihai
http://unixsadm.blogspot.com

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Peter Stephenson | 5 Aug 16:51

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

"Mihai Criveti" wrote:
> That was my issue with building yodl on AIX. I think I'm better off
> rewriting the makefiles :-\.

Yes, the build system was a particular annoyance.

> Of course, I could just generate the docs on Solaris or some BSD and
> move the Doc directory to the AIX machine. Anyone see any fault in
> that reasoning?

There shouldn't be any problem with that at.

--

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

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Geoff Wing | 5 Aug 13:26

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

On Tuesday 2008-08-05 13:46 +0300, Mihai Criveti output:
[...stuff elided...]
: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.

Zsh distribution sites have it in the ``GPL'' subdirectory (which has GPL
stuff we use in the build)

Regards,
Geoff