[Mageia-dev] texi2html

[Giuseppe Ghibò]

On 26/09/2011 17:34, Anssi Hannula wrote:
> On 26.09.2011 15:47, nicolas vigier wrote:
>> On Sat, 24 Sep 2011, Thomas Spuhler wrote:
>>> But are you sure about texlive providing it?
>> I don't know. It looks like it's not in the texlive package.
> My impression (from a few years back I think) is that standalone
> texi2html is the texlive-era replacement for tetex-texi2html.
>
It's not like this. The misalignment in having multiple versions comes
from having different source of packages. tetex had it's own texi2html
(so I guess texlive), which is certified and well QA and integrated with
that tetex version, so it provides "texi2html". At a certain point newer
versions of texi2html were placed in contrib because they were newer
(there were also other packages in this situation, xdvi, prosper, etc.)
and because of not touching the main tetex package. To handle this kind
of misalignment a good way to proceed would be to go in the main package
providing it (i.e. tetex/texlive) and try to merge the newer texi2html
with the new one, then redoing the tests. This often doesn't happen
because it takes a lot of amount of time, and require to handle with the
main and bigger package (texlive/tetex), and people often don't do this
if they are doing "snack packaging".

The other way, which is to transform everything as "pluggable" (e.g.
split packages at source, so for instance not having tetex providing
texi2html) IMHO doesn't provide the same amount of certification,
because the packager (packager not necessarely means the maintainer)
just upgrade the version number, without taking care of re-testing, and
in case he doesn't know in deep about that package what he does as side
effect is to give away the upstream tetex/texlive certification
(certification that the included, so older, texi2html package works well
and has no flaws with the rest of the tetex/texlive distro) in favour of
a newer version (hoping that if something goes wrong or of some bug some
end-user would file a bug on bugzilla...).

Bye.
G.