Re: texi2html/makeinfo in dist

[Patrice Dumas]

On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 06:02:55PM +0000, Karl Berry wrote:
>     I think that all that relates to texi2html is gone.
> 
> BTW, do you intentionally not want to install a texi2html?
> Seems like it could be useful, for people who are used to using it?

I am still hesitating.  texi2html should be a simple shell script wrapper 
along:

  texi2any --set TEXI2HTML $@

But it is not fully compatible with texi2html.  The API has completly
changed, command-line options are interpreted with the 'gnu' option of
GetOpt, the meaning of some customization variables have changed,
there is no latex2html support anymore, and there are certainly some
other differences...

>     Also setting the paths for texi2any called as makeinfo is a bit clumsy.
> 
> We should make it easy to get any behavior with any name, not only
> depending on $0.  

That's not the primary issue here.  Well the problem has some connection
with different behaviour based on $0, as $0 is used to determine that 
texi2any.pl is called and not texi2any which indicates that we are 
in-source, and if called as texi2any.pl paths are correct for in-source 
call.

> (The GNU standards go even further, saying that $0
> should not be used to vary behavior at all, but I don't feel compelled
> to follow that.)  For instance, we could support:
>   texi2any --as=makeinfo
>   makeinfo --as=texi2any
>   texi2any --as=texi2html
>   ...
> with --as resetting the defaults to be that of the given program.
> I feel like we talked about this at some point.  Is it too painful to do
> for some reason?

I did it for the previous texi2any implementation and it was --program.
But now, I think that texi2html would better be a wrapper as proposed 
above, and there is no difference between being called as texi2any 
or makeinfo anymore.  So this is not needed anymore.

To be honest, there is one difference, $0 appears in error messages, 
but I think it doesn't matter.

>     If the --help output of texi2any.pl, 
> 
> Well, we should create man pages for all the programs we install, so
> we'll need both makeinfo help and texi2any help.  I'll tackle that next.

Ok.

-- 
Pat