Re: Better Help Docs Searching?

[Zach Riggle <zachriggle@gmail.com>]

Peter

## Building Docs from Source
Thanks for the information.  I might be misinterpreting your
information ("earlier stage...uses what's there") so I tried a "make
all" and the Docs/ directory seems to be in an even worse situation.

I also took "If you don't have Yodl" to mean "not having Yodl
installed / a yodl binary in $PATH".  I don't see anything that I can
"brew install" that handles this, and having checked out the source
code for yodl (https://gitlab.com/fbb-git/yodl.git).  Building YODL
itself requires "icmake" which is unavailable, and not installable via
"brew" (Homebrew).

## Using the Docs from SourceForge

> If you don't have Yodl you can grab the doc package from the same place as the
> source package and it has all this pre-built

I do see SourceForge has [1] a zsh-5.8-doc.tar.xz, which may be what
you referred to.  It has the pre-built source, a pre-built PDF, and
does appear to have some ".info" files pre-built.

After extraction, running the command "info -f Doc/zsh.info" works.
Selecting the "17 Shell Builtin Commands" section, I can hit shift-i
to go to an "Index Entry".  This is good! Before there were no
indices.

Typing in "read" the index prompt, takes me to the first incidence of
the word "read" (which is under the ". FILE" section), which isn't
much better than the man-pages or web-browser search.  Hitting the
comma key (",") to move to the next match cycles between matches, but
never actually arrives at the documentation for the "read" builtin
[2].

[1]: https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Arc/source.html
[2]: https://i.imgur.com/2dPlevy.png

Zach Riggle

On Tue, Aug 3, 2021 at 3:45 AM Peter Stephenson
<p.w.stephenson@ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
> > On 03 August 2021 at 09:09 Zach Riggle <zachriggle@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Follow-up-to-follow-up, and apologies for the spam.  It appears that,
> > while "make info" worked, it did not actually generate anything useful
> > in "Doc/zsh.texi".
> >
> >   $ make info
> >   makeinfo ./zsh.texi
> >
> >   $ git status --ignored -sb | grep '!!' | awk '{print $2}' | xargs wc -l
> >        114 Config/defs.mk
> >        655 Doc/Makefile
> >         36 Doc/Zsh/manmodmenu.yo
> >        221 Doc/Zsh/modlist.yo
> >         38 Doc/Zsh/modmenu.yo
> >          9 Doc/version.yo
> >          2 Doc/zsh.info <------- two bytes
> >          0 Doc/zsh.texi <------- zero
>
> zsh.texi is generated by an earlier stage from the Yodl source; makeinfo simply uses what's
> there.  If you don't have Yodl you can grab the doc package from the same place as the
> source package and it has all this pre-built.
>
> pws
>