Re: texi2dvi: A more pleasant way to compile

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello,

On Fri, May 27, 2005 at 12:42:44PM -0400, Karl Berry wrote:
> Do others on this list have an opinion?

I think that people might have uneasy feelings if a new subdir
appears in their work dir.  They are not surprised by regular files,
but a subdir is percepted differently.

The original patch said:

         benefits are:
         - the output is updated when each tex compilation is completed:
         - to allow interactive viewing
         - to preserve the previous output is the compilation fails
         - if the compilation fails, the previous state is preserved.
         - a fix set of files to clean in this end (this directory)
         - a perfect independence between DVI and PDF compilations.

I might have missed something, but it seems that each of these benefits
is already provided by --clean, ie. without preserving the directory.

So the fact that you rpeserve the dir is only an optimization (you don't
have to run TeX twice).  So the golden rule "don't optimize" applies here.

If we wanted to optimize, we could try to identify auxiliary files which
should be preserved (sorted indices, etc.) and copy them to the main dir
after each successful compilation.

But, of course, that brings some problems: What is the exact list of
files to be copied?  The independence of DVI and PDF output is gone, but
that might be good, because if you are lucky, you saved one round of
compilation.

To conclude, I think it moght be a good idea to modify Automake so that
it uses something like  texi2dvi --clean
It might be good that the work dir would contain less aux files.
But this is just a rough idea, perhaps --clean should be modified somehow
for this purpose.  For example, I'm not sure whether the (not preserved)
subdir should go to current dir or to tmpdir.

Just a quick opinion,
        Stepan Kasal