> From: Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0...@gmail.com> > Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2024 22:22:45 +0100 > Cc: bug-texinfo@gnu.org > > I can imagine that at some point we will abandon the Perl version of > some code, requiring XS to use texi2any.
One problem with doing that is that the distributed binaries of Texinfo will require a very specific version of Perl -- the one against which the XS modules were compiled. In practice, this means that distros will need to make a specific Perl version to be a prerequisite for upgrading Texinfo, because distributing Perl binaries with Texinfo is not practical. On MS-Windows, this is even more problematic, because there are several incompatible ports of Perl to Windows. That is the reason why I always remove the XS modules from the binary distributions I put on ezwinports site -- I cannot possibly distribute the binaries of Perl I use to compile XS, and cannot even hope people are likely to have the same Perl installed. With texi2any automatically falling back to Perl when XS modules cannot be found this is just a performance issue, but if Texinfo requires XS, this would mean users will be unable to run makeinfo in such cases.
