Re: Spurious diagnostics from texi2dvi -E

[Gavin Smith]

On 7 April 2015 at 00:31, Karl Berry <address@hidden> wrote:
>     Can someone explain what "Unfortunately makeinfo --iftex --no-ifinfo
>     doesn't work well enough (yet), makeinfo can't parse the TeX
>     commands, so work around with sed."  what TeX commands can't
>     makeinfo parse?
>
> I wrote that in the days of makeinfo 4.  Just for starters, with that
> makeinfo, any use of plain TeX braces (e.g., {\it foo}) failed.  Current
> makeinfo can handle that, and more.
>
>     Contents of @iftex shouldn't be TeX commands anyway, TeX commands
>     would occur in @tex.
>
> --iftex necessarily enables parsing of @tex as well as @iftex, like all
> the --ifFMT options.

OK got it, @tex is commented out as well.

> If changes are needed re error reporting, output generation, or whatever
> else, well, this is software, anything is possible.  Patrice and I never
> spent time hooking the new makeinfo into texi2dvi, although we had it in
> the back of our minds.  My impression was that essentially no one used
> -E, since I never got bug reports about it, and it was obviously
> fragile.
>
> If you want to pursue it, more power to you.  My suggestion would be to
> make another option, say --expand-new, so experiments can be done
> without disturbing any existing use of -E.  For one thing, it will be
> necessary to detect the makeinfo version and fall back to sed if it's
> still makeinfo 4 (or earlier).

The question is whether we can rely on texi2dvi using a makeinfo
program from the same release. For one thing people can download
texi2dvi separately from the FTP site and they are not likely to have
the same version installed.

However, when such people are running texi2dvi, this will not normally
use an installed makeinfo program, unless they use the "-E" option.

The problem occurs when somebody has an older Texinfo release
installed, but for whatever reason they want a newer version of
texi2dvi, and they additionally use the -E option.

>
>     I think the "menu before Top node" error, if it is annoying, could
>     be best dealt with by changes in the input Texinfo files to include
>     the menu within the @ifnottex conditional.
>
> I strongly disagree.  Telling users to change their documents should
> always be a extremely reluctant last resort.  @menu is inherently
> non-TeX, so it should be treated as such.  I'd propose changing makeinfo
> simply to omit that diagnostic if --iftex is specified.  If that does
> not suit, I'd propose adding a configuration variable explicitly to tell
> makeinfo to it complaint, and then texi2dvi can pass that variable.
> Whatever is needed ...

I just tried with Sergey's changes that you installed and the error
message doesn't appear so it shouldn't be necessary.