[tex-live] TeXlive for Debian/Sarge and upward - version 2005.08.24-1 online

[Karl Berry]

    Why do these packages ship texinfo.tex at all?

One reason is that a package might well need a newer texinfo.tex than
comes with the user's system.  Until fairly recently, all (GNU/)Linux
distributions had a texinfo.tex (and TeX in general) that was many, many
years old.

    For it to be actually usefull, one has to install a TeX system
    anyway - why not also require to install texinfo?

Requiring texinfo does not help.  Texinfo does not install texinfo.tex
(by default) and never has.  This is because I am unable to think of any
rational way for Texinfo, in its original GNU package incarnation, to
determine where to install it.  There is an install-tex target so
users/distributors who know where they want the files can install it,
but that's the best I've been able to do.

    some ancient texinfo version tested whether \pdfoutput is defined
    and set it to 1

Ah.  I didn't realize that was the problem.  Not necessarily that
ancient -- that whole \pdfoutput thing became an issue last year.
So if Octave, Make, or anyone else gets their texinfo.tex updated,
hopefully the problem will go away.

However, I'm a bit confused about why it was a problem in the first
place.  In TeX Live, we adopted an approach that kept compatibility, by
reading a file pdftex-dvi.tex when the non-pdf formats are built, which
undefines \pdfoutput and the like, precisely because of problems like
this.

Thomas, did you end up deciding to break compatibility in teTeX?  I
thought you had gone along with that, but maybe not.  Yeah, I think I do
remember that you didn't, after all.  So it goes.

karl