bug#29188: [PATCH] texi2dvi usage doesn't work with <texinfo-4.9

[Karl Berry]

Gavin, thanks for your comments. Always appreciated.

Bogdan, thanks for the patch. I (or the mythical Someone Else) will look
into it. My gut reaction is that it's good to make things work with old
versions in principle, although admittedly Apple's no-GPLv3 policy is
not something we care about supporting, particularly.

Regarding Solaris, proprietary operating systems have always been a
secondary target for GNU programs, which is why I have not felt bad
about ignoring the various Solaris bugs. However, it's fine to install
fixes for them. (I doubt the fixes are hard, either.) For what rms has
to say about platform support, see the end of
https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Platforms.html.

Regarding verbose commentary, although it's true that in general they
can make understanding/modifying unnecessarily difficult, in the
particular case of Automake, they've proven to be very helpful. In
Automake, it's common for a given piece of code to be written in a
specific way for a specific reason (usually due to some old shell X,
some strange platform Y, etc.), and writing it in another way (usually
more "natural") doesn't work. So it's good to describe what's going on.

Certainly it would have been much harder for me to contribute anything
to automake without all the careful comments by Ralf, Stefano, Tom, and
all the other past maintainers. So I have no hesitation for giving a +1
for your detailed comments here, and in general. --thanks, karl.