Re: Brittleness with texinfo and version numbering

[John W. Eaton]

On 13-Oct-2009, Rik wrote:

| I agree it's a problem with texinfo, but I think it will take a longer
| to fix it this way than simply avoiding the problem.

The problem only shows up if you do a "make dist" on an Octave version
from the hg archive, which isn't something that I expect to happen
often.  If I make a snapshot, then I use a "normal" version number.

| If there's a hole 
| in the sidewalk I can call the city and it might be repaired 6 months
| from now.  Or I could just walk down a different street.

Would you also call the city while walking down the different street,
or just leave it to someone else to do that job?

| There were already problems with this exact macro in 2008 when it
| wouldn't accept the '@' character and David Bateman had to query and
| track down a bug fix.  Not to be mean to the texinfo developers, but I
| just don't have time to pursue that process.

As I recall, Karl Berry fixed the problem promptly, and all we needed
to do was distribute a patched version of texinfo.tex until a fixed
version was released.  I expect the same might happen this time.

For me, one of the big plusses of free software is that we can fix
bugs rather than just work around them.  But that requires that people
actually report problems that they encounter rather than just trying
to avoid them.

jwe