texi2any --pdf and parsing

[Karl Berry]

Hi Patrice,

It seems (from using --debug) that running texi2any --dvi foo.texi ends
up parsing all of foo.texi, and then ignoring any results and just
exec-ing texi2dvi.  Thus:

$ texi2any --debug -1 --dvi auctex.texi
NEW LINE(_root::2.): @comment %**start of header
.. many debugging lines omitted ...
COMMAND bye
ABORT EMPTY additional text ||, current ||
CLOSE PARA
EXEC texi2dvi|--debug|--dvi|auctex.texi
.. texi2dvi output...

Do you recall why?
I tried to look through our old archives, but couldn't find a discussion
about it.

Perhaps it was specifically so the user would get makeinfo's error
messages on the input file, but that doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
(If the user wants makeinfo's error messages, they should generate one
of the usual formats.)

Or maybe it was so that if various conf variables are set, to generate
sort element counts or other such special things, their actions would
take effect?  I rather surmise that users would not expect those things
to work in the $call_texi2dvi cases.  At least, it doesn't seem worth
breaking the equivalence of calling texi2any --dvi vs. texi2dvi.

Looking at texi2any.pl, I surmise that just moving up the exec block
(currently the last thing in the file) to inside the first time
$call_texi2dvi is tested would work (it did in some simple cases
anyway).  However, presumably it was intentional that all the other
stuff was done before texi2dvi was invoked, so ... asking ... ?

With valid Texinfo input, it doesn't matter.  But when people play games
because they know too much about texinfo.tex, as auctex does, the result
is errors from texi2any even though texi2dvi is happy.  And I know that
quite a few manuals do play around at the TeX level, so ...

Thanks,
Karl