> From: Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0...@gmail.com> > Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2024 17:30:53 +0000 > Cc: Eli Zaretskii <e...@gnu.org>, help-texinfo@gnu.org > > > > Changing such long-standing behavior just because it looks like > > > "redundant" is not the best idea IME, but if no manuals and no > > > browsers use this, maybe it's not as painful as I fear it could be. > > > > Note that this behavior has been here since GNU Texinfo 6.4, and is > > generally good. I am only proposing altering the 'Top' node (usually, > > index.html). > > As you point out, the page title changed in that version of Texinfo, > as before it was like "Using the GNU Compiler Collection - Top" with > the manual name first. NEWS entry: > > . for HTML output, place section names before the manual in page > titles, instead of after them, so it is easier to distinguish pages > if titles are truncated > > 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. 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. 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...