Re: HTML <title> node names: Not emitting 'Top (Manual name)'

[Arsen Arsenović]

Hi Gavin, Eli,
Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0123@gmail.com> writes:

> On Wed, Mar 13, 2024 at 09:25:44PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> > Nobody complained about this breaking any stability.
>> 
>> Ha! the amount of grief those changes caused the Emacs maintainers is
>> beyond complaining.  We have a script that massages the produced HTML
>> manuals for the Web site, and we run the script each time another
>> Emacs version is released and the manual needs to be updated on the
>> Web site.  Every single release of Texinfo, until very recently,
>> would break the script and cause me personally and my colleagues a
>> lot of gray hair wand wasted time.  So much so that I seriously
>> considered to stop updating to the latest Texinfo on the system where
>> I usually work on Emacs releases.

May I ask, what do these scripts do?  If so much fragile post-processing
is needed, perhaps Texinfo should be altered to be more extensible or
such..

IMO, the fact that a GNU project had to resolve to that is a sign of
dysfunction.

Making a stable and abstract way to accommodate for all sorts of needs
isn't very simple, and won't happen overnight, but IMO, if there is
indeed need like this, it should happen.

>> Finally, a few Texinfo versions ago, these changes have stopped, and
>> we had a few Emacs releases without a single problem in this area.
>> No longer, it looks like...
>> 
>> And no, I didn't complain, because I never imagined (and don't imagine
>> now) that someone would seriously consider backing out the offending
>> changes, just because one project suffers from them.  But you'd be
>> wrong taking silence for a sign of no problems.

> By all means, if changing the page title for the Top node causes
> significant problems, we can avoid making this change.  But it is
> hard to imagine why it would cause a problem.
>
> I don't mind avoiding this time for the time being, if it is felt
> there has been a lot of change to the HTML output recently.  Once
> things settle down, we could revisit this.

This could be a customization variable or such in the meanwhile too.

>> Once again: IME making breaking changes "just because we can" is not
>> the best strategy for stable projects.  But I'm not a Texinfo
>> maintainer, so my opinions on this probably doesn't mean much...
>
> The change being proposed here wasn't for no reason.

Indeed, thanks for acknowledging.

Have a lovely evening!
-- 
Arsen Arsenović

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