Re: texi2dvi: A more pleasant way to compile

[Stepan Kasal]

Hi,

On Tue, May 31, 2005 at 11:45:12AM -0400, Karl Berry wrote:
> Overall, I think I'm becoming convinced that the patch is a good idea
> and should even be the new default [...]

OK, I don't protest.  I wanted to present different angles, but don't
count me as being ``against'' Akim's patch.

But what remains is the problem with backward compatibility.
If texi2dvi creates *.t2d by default, then that release of makeinfo
is not compatible with Automake-1.9. [foot-1]

> -- 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.

In other words, if this is added to Automake-1.10, then I think you have
to wait at least 1 year after it is released, and then you can change
the default.

OTOH, if you adopt my approach--build in a subdir, but copy the xref files
after a successful compilation, you get all the advantages from Akim's
initial patch decription [foot-2] and you are still backward compatible.

So I suggest that we first implement the backward compatible part.
Akim, do you have time to extract that part of your patch?

Have a nice day,
        Stepan Kasal

Footnotes:
[foot-1]
I meant this: after upgrading texinfo, "make distcheck" will surprisingly
fail in a project which used to pass it.  That's evil.

[foot-2]
We loose the independence of dvi and pdf.  But as I said before, this could
actually speed up usual builds.
And what happens if dvi output is substantially different from pdf output?
Both outputs will be generated correctly.  If you run "dvi, pdf, dvi, ..."
the process will be slow.  But when you work on a manual, you usually don't
do that; you just use one format for most of the work, and you debug the
other one only occassionally.  So I still think this is not a big problem.