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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Arsen Arsenović <arsen@aarsen.me>
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>,  help-texinfo@gnu.org
> Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2024 22:34:00 +0100
> 
> >> 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?

Feel free to study admin/admin.el in the Emacs repository, and
specifically the few manual-html-fix-* functions there.

> If so much fragile post-processing is needed, perhaps Texinfo should
> be altered to be more extensible or such..

Maybe.  I'm just the janitor here: the procedure for an Emacs release
says to run these scripts, so I'm running them, and when they fail for
some reason, I get to try to understand the reason and fix it somehow,
to be able to upload the latest manuals to the Web site.

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

I think at least some, if not most, of the issues these scripts
attempt to fix were already fixed in Texinfo since the scripts where
written.  I didn't write those scripts and have no knowledge or
documentation of the problems they attempt to fix and the reasons for
those fixes, except what the code says (which isn't a lot).

> 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.

I'm not sure the HTML output of texi2any is (or can be) specifically
tailored to the needs of presenting a project's manuals on the GNU
Software Web site (https://www.gnu.org/software/).  For example, every
manual is generated in 2 forms: a single HTML file and one file per
node; texi2any does support each of these outputs, but the
requirements from the heading lines and preambles for each one are
slightly different, when the above site is targeted.