The generation of gravitational waves. 2. The post-linear formalism revisted

Different versions of the Green's function for the scalar wave equation in weakly curved space-time are compared and contrasted and their mathematical equivalence is demonstrated. Then the DeWitt--DeWitt Green's function is used to construct several alternative versions of the Thorne--Kovacs post-linear formalism for gravitational-wave generation. Finally, it is shown that, in calculations of gravitational bremsstrahlung radiation, some of the presented versions of the post-linear formalism allow one to treat the interacting bodies as point masses, while others do not