On Wed, Oct 16, 2024 at 08:16:35AM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote: > > 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.
In that case it's likely we'll have to keep on maintaining C and Perl code side-by-side for as long as the program is written in Perl, even if this makes making changes in the program more difficult.
