Re: texi2dvi: A more pleasant way to compile

[Karl Berry]

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

I'm not sure I buy this.  I don't see a big difference between
directories and files.

    So the fact that you rpeserve the dir is only an optimization

But a very important one.  In fact, I was the one who noticed and
complained when clean was enabled by default for a while :).

    The independence of DVI and PDF output is gone, but
    that might be good, 

There are arguments both ways.  I don't think it is an overriding factor.


Overall, I think I'm becoming convinced that the patch is a good idea
and should even be the new default -- provided that Automake will know
to rm -rf *.t2d in the next release, so maintainers won't have to do
anything once they get a new Automake.  Akim, did you get any response on that?

Also, Akim, let me ask this: wdyt about providing an option
(--traditional? --local?) which to get the previous behavior?  That way,
if someone doesn't want to fuddle around with Automake or anything else
and is happy with how things were, at least there would be a simple way
to get it.

Maybe I am being too persnickety, but since backward incompatibilities
have caused me so much grief (in much more important utilities; tail
-10, etc.), I hate to perpetrate them myself.

Thanks,
karl