> From: Arsen Arsenović <ar...@aarsen.me> > Cc: Eli Zaretskii <e...@gnu.org>, help-texinfo@gnu.org > Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2024 22:34:00 +0100 > > >> 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?
Feel free to study admin/admin.el in the Emacs repository, and specifically the few manual-html-fix-* functions there. > If so much fragile post-processing is needed, perhaps Texinfo should > be altered to be more extensible or such.. Maybe. I'm just the janitor here: the procedure for an Emacs release says to run these scripts, so I'm running them, and when they fail for some reason, I get to try to understand the reason and fix it somehow, to be able to upload the latest manuals to the Web site. > IMO, the fact that a GNU project had to resolve to that is a sign of > dysfunction. I think at least some, if not most, of the issues these scripts attempt to fix were already fixed in Texinfo since the scripts where written. I didn't write those scripts and have no knowledge or documentation of the problems they attempt to fix and the reasons for those fixes, except what the code says (which isn't a lot). > 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. I'm not sure the HTML output of texi2any is (or can be) specifically tailored to the needs of presenting a project's manuals on the GNU Software Web site (https://www.gnu.org/software/). For example, every manual is generated in 2 forms: a single HTML file and one file per node; texi2any does support each of these outputs, but the requirements from the heading lines and preambles for each one are slightly different, when the above site is targeted.
