Re: [PATCH v2 0/5] A small Texinfo refinement

[Richard Biener <richard.guenther@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Mar 10, 2023 at 8:00 PM Gerald Pfeifer <gerald@pfeifer.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 10 Mar 2023, Sandra Loosemore wrote:
> > AFAIK we have not knowingly changed any specific requirements beyond the
> > stated 4.7 and 4.9 for PDF output, but it concerns me that nobody is
> > likely to be using versions that old on a regular basis to make sure
> > they continue to work and we haven't unknowingly introduced dependencies
> > on newer Texinfo features.
>
> I'm generally very interested in ensuring we do not hurt users who do not
> have the latest and greatest of the day. On the other hand, if there's a
> few people using (more or less deliberately abandonware) we should not
> feel too bad if something breaks.
>
> > Anyway, I think I will leave the existing requirement alone for now, and
> > just add a note that newer versions produce better output.
>
> With Richi mentioning that SLE 12 (which was first released 9 years ago)
> uses texinfo 4.13a and Andrew mentioning that RHEL 7 uses texinfo 5.1 I
> would feel very comfortable making either 4.13 or even 5.1 the new minimum.
>
> (Not because we need to cater to those two Enterprise Linux distros,
> rather since they tend to fall on the conversative side.)

We could also opt to ship generated pdf documentation with the
release tarballs - the pre-built info format plus manual pages is
probably of less use these days?

Richard.

> Gerald