On Sun, Mar 02, 2025 at 07:33:45PM +0000, Gavin Smith wrote: > On Sun, Mar 02, 2025 at 04:58:09PM +0100, pertu...@free.fr wrote: > > > > (However, I'm not certain that .translit etc. suffixes would be the > > > end of augmenting the htmlxref.cnf format, so we should think if there > > > are any other factors that would affect HTML cross-references.) > > > > Maybe we could have a version for the file format such that it is easy to > > extend the format? > > I doubt that a version number would help. What is a program supposed to > do if it gets a config or data file with the wrong version number? > Nobody knows.
It is supposed to parse according to the version of the format. Of course it cannot be forward compatible, but it can be backward compatible. > As we upload cross-reference information to ftp.gnu.org and encourage > people to keep the version of files up-to-date, and people may also > distribute htmlxref.cnf files with documentation sources, we should > expect that any version of texi2any could read any version of htmlxref.cnf > and avoid making incompatible changes. We should have a way to change the format if needed. We cannot have the same format forever if it is not adequate. We should avoid changing it, but never ever changing it again in a backward compatible way seems to me to be too constaining. We can make it easier to transition, though. For example: * announce in advance the change in format * make change only for major release * provide scripts to convert between formats * document in the manual the range of compatibility > Even for the htmlxref.d change, > we still want to be able to recommend that users can concatenate the > contents of this directory to get an htmlxref.cnf file that could be > used by an older version of texi2any. That's a good point. I do not think that the concatenation is an issue if the two files have the same format. But I agree that currently we propose to users to use the latest version irrespective of the version of texi2any they use. Maybe we could provide the files in the different format versions, at least for one or two older versions? -- Pat
