Re: texi2dvi: A more pleasant way to compile

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello,

On Tue, May 31, 2005 at 10:34:44AM +0200, Akim Demaille wrote:
> >>> "Stepan" == Stepan Kasal <address@hidden> writes:
> 
>  > 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.
> 
> You must be kidding! [...]
> Your sentence, slightly twisted, is almost "after linking, object
> files should be removed, leaving them is merely an optimization".

The difference is that the number of prerequisities of each .o file is small.
When you re-run TeX, none of the xref files is known to be correct.

> How big is the biggest file you ever worked on?

-rw-r--r--    1 kasal    users      591140 May 25 08:42 doc/autoconf.texi

But I only make patches for it.  But when I run make, I don't notice any delay.

I don't use Texinfo, that's it.  ;-)

I used TeX a lot years ago.  Compared with 386, I think TeX compilation is
immediate.  (TeX cannot keep pace as gcc does--TeX is still the same code.)

> Don't forget people using texi2dvi with LaTeX, where there can be many
> more runs.

In theory yes, but I think that in the vast majority of cases two runs
suffice.

And I haven't said it should be what you get when you call ``texi2dvi''.
I just said that Automake should call it.  Is it usual to use the
Automake-generated rules for compilation of LaTeX documents?

>  > To conclude, I think it moght be a good idea to modify Automake so
>  > that it uses something like  texi2dvi --clean
> 
> It is not: people are not willing to wait longer (in fact a bug in
> texi2dvi almost achieved the same result).

OK, then the optimization would be needed; it'd be easy:
at the end of the build, the xref_files are copied to the main directory.
(We can tar them, if we want to have less files in the main dir.)

But since the compilation happens in another dir, you still have most
of the advantages.

The function get_xref_files can again be simplified; as we are in a
separate playground.

Yes, this gets close to your --build proposal, but the subdir is not
retained, just the individual files.

Have a nice day,
        Stepan