[texdoc] [tex-live] texdoc output changes

[Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard]

[cc + reply-to the texdoc list]

Adam R. Maxwell a écrit :
> My TeX Live Utility program for Mac OS X (a simple GUI for tlmgr) also
> uses texdoc to look up documentation for listed packages.  Users have
> started reporting failures in this feature, and it appears that texdoc
> has some rather significant changes in its output format (as well as the
> meaning of option flags).
> 
Yes, the options concerning verbosity changed, and the output of -l, -s and -m
mode combined with -I.

> 1) what texdoc version changed behavior (I have 0.4, and I understand
> that 0.42 is different)
> 
There is no version between 0.4 and 0.42 (except the svn version of course). So
the changes are in 0.42.

> Basically, all I want is the path, but I'd also like to keep
> compatibility with the older version as shipped with TL 2008.  Is there
> a reliable way to get the path from the new form of output?
> 
The idea behind the 0.4 behaviour is that in non-interactive mode, the numbers
are not needed in order to select the files. Then the change in 0.42 was to make
the output more homogeneous with interactive mode: a purely cosmetic change.
Sorry for the inconvenience caused, I wasn't aware that texdoc was already used
by other programs.

Unfortunately, I also (very stupidly) changed the way texdoc announces its
version in the meanwhile from
	texdoc version: 0.4
to
	texdoc 0.42
and even, for the svn versions (which should not appear in TL):
	texdoc 0.42+ svn r45

Anyway, you can always get the version info with the regex (perl-style)

^texdoc (?:version: )? (\d\.\d+)

Then for 0.4 you can do as usual, and for 0.42 you can get the path from each
line with (still PCRE):

^\s*\d+\s(.*)$

Maybe I should add an option for easily machine-readable output?

Anyway, I'd like to suggest you subscribe to the texdoc list (usually low
traffic) so you can at least be informed when I do such changes, or even prevent
me from doing them if they are laikely to break things.

Thanks,
Manuel.