On 5/20/21 10:50 AM, Kerry Shetline wrote:
Is there a particular reason that the following situation is handled with bespoke awk processing:
The goal was to keep the data source simple, and put hacks into ziguard.awk when that's easy. I would rather not have these hacks bleed into the data source.
It would be great if the special comments would be all one needed to parse the data for rearguard, main, or vanguard.
I see where you're coming from, but that's not the goal here. I didn't want to invent a preprocessor for zic, creating technology that would have to be documented and supported and have backwards-compatibility problems of its own. The vanguard/main/rearguard stuff is just a hopefully-temporary hack that, once it evaporates, will require zero maintenance. By the way, is anybody still using rearguard format? If not, perhaps it's time to retire this stuff now. (That would save us all the hassle of conversations like this one. :-)