On Sun, Mar 17, 2024 at 04:31:35PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote: > I'm really uneasy about adding this kind of stuff to Emacs, unless > someone comes on board who has much better command of Perl than I do, > and volunteers to maintain this. Maybe Stefan Kangas (CC'ed), who > co-maintains Emacs with me, could be that person. If not, I don't > think we should add to Emacs code that is more or less "black magic" > for us, because it will certainly need to be maintained in the future.
To me the priority on your side should not be to change to using that init file, but making sure of what is the intended output: * checking whether the <div> added is needed or not, as I think that it is not needed, * checking whether the links put by texi2any can be left, which, I think, should be the case, * to verify that the copyright in comment can be left in, which, in my opinion would be even better * to fix how CSS is generated, as currently it is not that correct, as Gavin also reported. If all that is done, it should simplify the maintenance of the Emacs manuals greatly independently of the way manuals are modified as the only things that would remain would be the removal of the first naviation header and the addition of the specific information in <head> which could easily be done either with an init file that can be maintained by somebody knowing nothing about Perl or with admin.el. > In addition, since this needs the next major release of Texinfo to > work correctly, we cannot start using this now anyway. There's also > the question of supporting old versions of Texinfo; while Texinfo 4 > sounds too old (although we have positive indications that at least > one of the active Emacs developers still uses it) and could be perhaps > dropped for this job, I think we do still want to support Texinfo 6 > and maybe also Texinfo 5. I'm not sure how this init file suggestion > works for previous releases of Texinfo, and if it doesn't, what to do > about that (probably leave the admin.el stuff in place?). Yes, I think that you should keep the admin.el stuff in place for some years in the future in any case, until the next release is the only one used, which should be something like 10 years ahead. It is possible to do init files that work with all the versions of texi2any starting with Texinfo 5 (such an example was posted on the bug-texinfo list relatively recently), but I advice against it in your case, as you have already something else working (although I think that you should fix the CSS part in the admin.el anyway). > I took the liberty of CC'ing Glenn Morris, who worked on those parts > of admin.el at the time and probably knows the reasons for at least > some of the edits it does, in the hope that he could chime in and > comment on these issues. That'd be nice to me if the questions above could be answered. Some background information in the same thread: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-texinfo/2024-03/msg00015.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-texinfo/2024-03/msg00023.html -- Pat