Hi Gavin, Eli, Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0...@gmail.com> writes: > On Wed, Mar 13, 2024 at 09:25:44PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote: >> > Nobody complained about this breaking any stability. >> >> Ha! the amount of grief those changes caused the Emacs maintainers is >> beyond complaining. We have a script that massages the produced HTML >> manuals for the Web site, and we run the script each time another >> Emacs version is released and the manual needs to be updated on the >> Web site. Every single release of Texinfo, until very recently, >> would break the script and cause me personally and my colleagues a >> lot of gray hair wand wasted time. So much so that I seriously >> considered to stop updating to the latest Texinfo on the system where >> I usually work on Emacs releases.
May I ask, what do these scripts do? If so much fragile post-processing is needed, perhaps Texinfo should be altered to be more extensible or such.. IMO, the fact that a GNU project had to resolve to that is a sign of dysfunction. Making a stable and abstract way to accommodate for all sorts of needs isn't very simple, and won't happen overnight, but IMO, if there is indeed need like this, it should happen. >> Finally, a few Texinfo versions ago, these changes have stopped, and >> we had a few Emacs releases without a single problem in this area. >> No longer, it looks like... >> >> And no, I didn't complain, because I never imagined (and don't imagine >> now) that someone would seriously consider backing out the offending >> changes, just because one project suffers from them. But you'd be >> wrong taking silence for a sign of no problems. > By all means, if changing the page title for the Top node causes > significant problems, we can avoid making this change. But it is > hard to imagine why it would cause a problem. > > I don't mind avoiding this time for the time being, if it is felt > there has been a lot of change to the HTML output recently. Once > things settle down, we could revisit this. This could be a customization variable or such in the meanwhile too. >> Once again: IME making breaking changes "just because we can" is not >> the best strategy for stable projects. But I'm not a Texinfo >> maintainer, so my opinions on this probably doesn't mean much... > > The change being proposed here wasn't for no reason. Indeed, thanks for acknowledging. Have a lovely evening! -- Arsen Arsenović
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