texinfo-5.0 available

[Joel Sherrill]

On 2/18/2013 8:57 AM, Gedare Bloom wrote:
> Ah ok thank you. I misunderstood the "release" here. I do think we
> should (and Joel probably is) start testing it out for our doc builds
> of course, but I am definitely opposed to adding any more packages to
> our tool chains than necessary.
That was exactly my point. We need to test against it and make
sure it works for us. If it needs different arguments or has new features
we want to take advantage of, we need to think about that.  My thinking
was that if there are differences, we need to detect and account for them.

It will take some time before new distributions pick this up. And there
will be older distributions which still use the old texinfo. This means
that being able to manage the transition period is important.

This is part of properly managing the dependencies on the tools we
use as a project.  We cannot stay behind while something we use
moves forward. And we may have to manage a transition.

We should NEVER fork our own version of something. We should
simply manage our use of the package with its maintainers and
submit issues and fixes upstream.

I do NOT want to release our own texinfo binaries. We just need to
manage the transition period.

It may however make sense to switch to it for the documentation
that we generate. That would only impact a handful of machines.
And it would be easy if the versions are compatible or easy to
detect and use enhanced features.

We need a plan. That's it.  As some of you have heard me complain,
we waited too long to move from GNATS to Bugzilla and I don't
want us to get caught like that again.

--joel
> On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 2:29 AM, Ralf Corsepius
> <ralf.corsepius at rtems.org> wrote:
>> On 02/17/2013 05:58 PM, Gedare Bloom wrote:
>>> Nice. Are we ready to switch our doc build to it?
>>
>> Well, texinfo-5.0 is new major release - I.e. a it's "dot null" release,
>> released 2 days ago, which is likely to come with a lot of yet unknown
>> regressions, incompatibilities and bugs.
>>
>> That said, IMO there'd be nothing wrong in individuals using it locally.
>> However, unless you want to add another package to the rtems-toolchains, I
>> do not consider it advisable to adopt it now and to mandatorially require it
>> for building RTEMS at this point in time (E.g. by exploiting new features).
>>
>> My advise: Not require it until texinfo-5.0 has seen substantial exposure
>> "to the wild" - E.g. until major Linux distros have adopted it and major
>> packages are using it.
>>
>> Ralf
>>
>>
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-- 
Joel Sherrill, Ph.D.             Director of Research & Development
joel.sherrill at OARcorp.com        On-Line Applications Research
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