Re: texi2dvi: A more pleasant way to compile

[Akim Demaille]

>>> "Karl" == Karl Berry <address@hidden> writes:

 > 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?

Not yet, but Alexandre is quite busy these days.  I can wrap a quick
patch though.

 > Also, Akim, let me ask this: wdyt about providing an option
 > (--traditional? --local?) which to get the previous behavior? 

That's more work, but of course it's doable.  I didn't not do that
initially, because it meant keeping two different logic coexisting.
For instance get_xref_files really needs two implementations, and I
meant to avoid that.  Supporting the two compilation schemes I
proposed is easy: basically the only differences are /tmp vs. . and rm
or not.

But if that makes it more acceptable, I'll do it.

I think there might be one reason why people might want to prefer
--traditional: if something goes weird it is more pleasant to be able
to use the tools by hand, running makeindex etc. from the shell.  If
the aux files are elsewhere, first you need to know where to go (but
that's quite obvious, and actually I was even thinking about putting a
README inside the *.t2d directory), and second you need to adjust
TEXINPUTS (what texi2dvi does for you).

But then, I'm not sure that the people who do this by hand would find
it hard to do all this.  And they would probably first try to fix
texi2dvi to circumvent the problem they faced.


 > 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.

I understand this.  I wish I don't :(


So?  Anybody else having an opinion on this?