Subject: bug#29188: [PATCH] texi2dvi usage doesn't work with <texinfo-4.9

From: Bogdan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2023 17:45:18 +0100

Karl Berry <[email-masked]>, Mon Mar 20 2023 15:36:11 GMT+0100 
(Central European Standard Time)
> Gavin, thanks for your comments. Always appreciated.
> 
> Bogdan, thanks for the patch. I (or the mythical Someone Else) will look
> into it. My gut reaction is that it's good to make things work with old
> versions in principle, although admittedly Apple's no-GPLv3 policy is
> not something we care about supporting, particularly.

  Neither do I care for it so much. But if someone reports an actual 
problem that something doesn't work on another system and I can make 
it work, I can do the fix if it's important or not such a great amount 
of work. Not only here, also in my programs.
  It increases the potential user range, not only to systems taking 
software with licenses they like and patching them indefinitely to 
move them forward (OpenBSD? macOS?), but simply also to older Linux 
systems.

> Regarding Solaris, proprietary operating systems have always been a
> secondary target for GNU programs, which is why I have not felt bad
> about ignoring the various Solaris bugs. However, it's fine to install
> fixes for them. (I doubt the fixes are hard, either.) For what rms has
> to say about platform support, see the end of
> https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Platforms.html.

  Got it. Do it if you can, because it widens the potential set of 
users. Don't do it if it creates a serious mess in the code.

> Regarding verbose commentary, although it's true that in general they
> can make understanding/modifying unnecessarily difficult, in the
> particular case of Automake, they've proven to be very helpful. In
> Automake, it's common for a given piece of code to be written in a
> specific way for a specific reason (usually due to some old shell X,
> some strange platform Y, etc.), and writing it in another way (usually
> more "natural") doesn't work. So it's good to describe what's going on.
> 
> Certainly it would have been much harder for me to contribute anything
> to automake without all the careful comments by Ralf, Stefano, Tom, and
> all the other past maintainers. So I have no hesitation for giving a +1
> for your detailed comments here, and in general. --thanks, karl.

  Thanks :)

-- 
Regards - Bogdan ('bogdro') D.                 (GNU/Linux & FreeDOS)
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