Re: Task-completion reporting does not reflect -o argument

[Gavin Smith]

On Wed, Nov 08, 2023 at 03:07:04PM -0500, Jonathan Dushoff wrote:
> When I specify an alternative pdf target on the command line, the
> argument is respected, but the console reports that it is not. See
> below. This can cause serious confusion in complicated work flows, and
> is presumably easy to fix.

It's not completely straighforward.  texi2pdf calls pdftex, which outputs
the file in the default location.  texi2pdf then moves the file to the
output location.

It's possible to output a message about moving the file:

diff --git a/util/texi2dvi b/util/texi2dvi
index e33d8eea44..47b7a7da68 100755
--- a/util/texi2dvi
+++ b/util/texi2dvi
@@ -595,7 +595,7 @@ move_to_dest ()
 
     if test "$mtd_sourcedir/$mtd_sourcebase" != "$mtd_destdir/$mtd_destbase"
     then
-      verbose "Moving $file to $mtd_destfile"
+      echo "Moving $file to $mtd_destfile"
       rm -f "$mtd_destfile"
       mv "$file" "$mtd_destfile"
     fi

Then for something like "texi2pdf info-stnd.texi -o foobar.pdf", the
output finishes:

Output written on info-stnd.pdf (45 pages, 305876 bytes).
Transcript written on info-stnd.log.
Moving info-stnd.pdf to /home/g/src/texinfo/GIT/doc/foobar.pdf

You can see the absolute path being used.

However, this also leads to extra messages being printed with --tidy
The output of "texi2pdf info-stnd.texi --tidy" finishes:

Output written on info-stnd.pdf (45 pages, 305876 bytes).
Transcript written on info-stnd.log.
Moving info-stnd.pdf to /home/g/src/texinfo/GIT/doc/info-stnd.pdf

So I'd propose a slightly more complicated change:

diff --git a/util/texi2dvi b/util/texi2dvi
index e33d8eea44..f486ecffc7 100755
--- a/util/texi2dvi
+++ b/util/texi2dvi
@@ -595,7 +595,10 @@ move_to_dest ()
 
     if test "$mtd_sourcedir/$mtd_sourcebase" != "$mtd_destdir/$mtd_destbase"
     then
-      verbose "Moving $file to $mtd_destfile"
+      case $oname in
+        '') verbose "Moving $file to $mtd_destfile" ;;
+        *)  echo    "Moving $file to $mtd_destfile" ;;
+      esac
       rm -f "$mtd_destfile"
       mv "$file" "$mtd_destfile"
     fi


- unconditionally outputing the "Moving" message only for the -o flag.

The main question is if is sensible to use the absolute file name even
if one was not given to -o.  I think it would be fine to.

I cannot see any option that could be given to etex or pdftex to
change the output file, and even if one existed there is a good chance
it wouldn't work on some versions of TeX.

> 
> I will mention also that the .log file is put in the default place
> (not matching the pdf file location). This might or might not be seen
> as an infelicity.

Again, it's done by TeX, and we can't do anything about it, other than
perhaps moving the log file afterwards, but this isn't worth the trouble
(and other auxiliary output files like indices, *.toc and *.aux will
also have the default names).