Re: texi2dvi: Honor -o

[Akim Demaille]

>>> "Karl" == Karl Berry <address@hidden> writes:

 >     The recent change that detached --output from --clean no longer
 >     honors --output.

 > A minor problem :).  Thanks for the fix.

Actually, I think that's why we had --clean implied by --output
(especially in Automake's output): it allowed to (i) be able to use
the file during the compilation, (ii) preserve the previous file if
the new one is corrupted.

 >     we can't read the file while we compile

 > Which is totally standard behavior for TeX since forever, so I don't
 > feel too bad about it -- suboptimal though it is.

 >     xpdf and other xdvi don't die

 > My experience is that they don't die, they just say "corrupted file" and
 > let you reload when it's done.

Right, that's what I meant :)  It makes no difference for the user:
she has to wait for the cycle to end to be able to resume her work :(

 >     compile to an auxiliary output, and mv it only at the end, so that
 >     xpdf and other xdvi don't die on an incomplete file.  WDYT?  

 > Sounds ok, as long as the aux files get read during the process and
 > saved at the end ready for next time.  That was the whole point of
 > skipping the --clean.

I very much agree.  Currently, I have a Makefile rule that looks like
this:

.tex.pdf:
        cp $< $<.tmp.tex
        $(TEXI2PDF) $(AM_TEXI2PDFFLAGS) $(TEXI2PDFFLAGS) $<.tmp.tex -o 
address@hidden
        mv address@hidden $@

but it results in longuish file names.  I'd like to be able to use the
same file names (foo.aux for foo.tex), but have it produce foo.tmp.dvi
or foo.tmp.pdf instead of directly foo.dvi|pdf.

 >     Do you know of any means to tell (pdf)tex to --output to another
 >     file?

 > An option --output-directory is supported at least in the current
 > version of web2c.  Don't know when it was added, and I've never actually
 > tried to use it.  If you want to experiment ...

That's indeed an alternative: we could have a directory for each
main.tex, instead of spreading all these files around.  Sort of
--clean that is preserved bw runs.