retitle 14410 Suggested Texinfo suffixes inconsistent with suggestions of Texinfo manual severity 14410 minor tags 14410 wontfix close 14410 stop
Reference: <http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=14410> > Hello Stefano. > Hi Antonio, sorry for the awful delay in replying. > Thanks for the detailed announcement. One learns things reading it. :-) > > Stefano Lattarini wrote: >> >> - Use of Texinfo input files with '.txi' or '.texinfo' extensions >> is discouraged, and its use will raise warnings in the 'obsolete' >> category. You are advised to simply use the '.texi' extension >> instead. > > After reading this, I have noticed an inconsistency between the automake > and texinfo manuals about what extension is preferred: > > [1]http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/Texinfo.html > "Any Texinfo source file must end in the .texi, .txi, or .texinfo > extension. We recommend .texi for new manuals." > > [2]http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/Minimum.html > "By convention, the name of a Texinfo file ends with (in order of > preference) one of the extensions .texinfo, .texi, .txi, or .tex. The > longer extensions are preferred since they describe more clearly to a > human reader the nature of the file. The shorter extensions are for > operating systems that cannot handle long file names." > > Is there a reason to recommend a different extension that what texinfo > itself recommends? > Yes, two related reasons: - Almost all existing GNU packages use the '.texi' extension for the sources of their Texinfo manuals. - To simplify the implementation, in Automake-NG I had decided to only support one suffix for Texinfo sources; since most existing packages use the '.texi' suffix already, that is the one I settled for, removing support for '.txi' and '.texinfo'. For backward compatibility reasons I didn't remove support for these two suffixes in mainline Automake, but still, I marked them as discouraged, in order to make an hypothetical transition to Automake-NG easier. Regards, Stefano