On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 05:29:29PM -0700, Robert Dodier wrote: > On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 3:08 PM, Karl Berry <[email protected]> wrote: > > > It's intentional that redefining a Texinfo command gives a warning. The > > idea is to use new names if you want different behavior, instead of > > redefining existing ones. > > OK, I guess, although that doesn't really seem consistent with > the description of @var and similar macros. [1]
Could you be more specific? I see nothing that implies that user defined macros could redefine the indicating commands? > >From what I remember, Texinfo 4 didn't give a warning about > redefining @var. Has anything changed in Texinfo 5 that would > affect how the macro works? (Aside from printing a warning.) > Maybe it's just that the code and documentation were written > by authors with different agendas? Nope, documentation is synchronized with the code. How macro expansion have changed between Texinfo 4 and 5, it is documented a bit in the NEWS file. Regarding the indicating variables, I think that nothing changed except for the warning. We thought that a valid reason to define a user defined macro for a Texinfo command was to cope with older versions not implementing the command. For that we added support for doing code for backward compatibility, documented in 'Testing for Texinfo Commands' http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/texinfo.html#Testing-for-Texinfo-Commands -- Pat
