[platform-testers] texinfo-6.8.90 pretest

[Gavin Smith]

The first pretest for the Texinfo 7.0 release has been uploaded to

https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/texinfo-6.8.90.tar.xz

There have been many changes since the previous release (see below),
but among the most notable are the addition of LaTeX and EPUB 3 as
texi2any output formats.

It's also significant that this release should build easily with glibc
2.34, and that the "info" program does not crash immediately in a
Brazilian Portuguese locale.

We hope that these pretest releases encourage wider testing before a
release, in order to increase overall quality and reliability of the
official release

Please send any comments to <bug-texinfo@gnu.org>.

Full news:
* texi2any
 . LaTeX added as an output format, selected with --latex
 . EPUB 3 added as an output format, selected with --epub3
 . Warn if full text commands (@ref, @footnote, @anchor) appear in @w
 . reform throughout the code in general
 . thorough review of character encoding issues
 . new customization variables involved with character encoding:
     INPUT_FILE_NAME_ENCODING, OUTPUT_FILE_NAME_ENCODING,
     DOC_ENCODING_FOR_INPUT_FILE_NAME, DOC_ENCODING_FOR_OUTPUT_FILE_NAME,
     MESSAGE_ENCODING and COMMAND_LINE_ENCODING.
 . IGNORE_BEFORE_SETFILENAME variable removed.  former effect
   is always on.
 . new variable NO_TOP_NODE_OUTPUT
 . HTML output:
     . USE_XML_SYNTAX, HTML_ROOT_ELEMENT_ATTRIBUTES and
       NO_CUSTOM_HTML_ATTRIBUTE variables added that can be used to output
       valid XHTML.
     . new variable IGNORE_REF_TO_TOP_NODE_UP
     . Use manual_name_html as output directory for split HTML instead of
       manual_name or manual_name.html
     . default DOCTYPE declaration changed to plain HTML5 style rather than
       HTML4 DTD reference
     . output only the CSS rules that are needed in an output file
     . remove CSS_LINES variable and add SHOW_BUILTIN_CSS_RULES.
       (custom CSS can still be output using EXTRA_HEAD.)
     . use <code> tag for the output of @t and @verb instead of <tt>
     . use <abbr> for @acronym instead of <acronym>
     . percent encode URL in @url/@uref, @email, @image and external manual
       file.
     . systematic addition of classes attribute in HTML elements based on the
       Texinfo @-command names.  Renaming of class attributes to avoid
       confusion with @-commands formatting and describe the role in the
       document rather than the formatting style.
     . classes from @example arguments are prefixed with 'user-'
     . COPIABLE_ANCHORS renamed to COPIABLE_LINKS
     . do not add a title in the default case, SHOW_TITLE has to be set
       (or NO_TOP_NODE_OUTPUT).
     . default value of USE_TITLEPAGE_FOR_TITLE is now true.
     . L2H variable removed.  replaced by HTML_MATH set to l2h.
     . rename OVERVIEW_LINK_TO_TOC to SHORT_TOC_LINK_TO_TOC, and rename
       BEFORE_OVERVIEW to BEFORE_SHORT_TOC_LINE and AFTER_OVERVIEW to
       AFTER_SHORT_TOC_LINES.
     . remove PRE_ABOUT, AFTER_ABOUT, and add PROGRAM_NAME_IN_ABOUT
     . remove KEEP_TOP_EXTERNAL_REF
     . new variable CONVERT_TO_LATEX_IN_MATH
     . add HTMLXREF_MODE and HTMLXREF_FILE
     . link to table of contents from short table of contents only if a
       table of contents is actually output
 . DocBook output:
     . do not output Top node nor text before the first @node or sectioning
       @-command.  NO_TOP_NODE_OUTPUT can be set to false to output Top node
       for now.
     . replace @definfocenlose defined @-commands by the argument as-is
       to be more consistent with printed output.
 . HTML/DocBook output:
     . meaning of USE_NUMERIC_ENTITY changed to be using numeric entities in
       priority.  former effect is now always on.
     . ENABLE_ENCODING_USE_ENTITY variable removed.  former effect is now
       always off.
 . info output
     . quote problematic node names (with :, comma...) in the default case
     . new customization variable ASCII_PUNCTUATION to use plain ASCII
       characters for quotation marks and a few other symbols
* texi2any, texinfo.tex
 . for @deftype* commands, use typewriter font in argument list

* texinfo.tex
  . `@microtype on' uses microtypography in formatting for pdfTeX and LuaTeX
  . do not ignore @part page immediately following Top node
  . for @deftype* commands, use typewriter font in argument list
  . do "@set txicodevaristt" to get slanted typewriter for @var in code,
    "@clear txicodevaristt" to use slanted, variable-width roman font for
    @var everywhere.  flag is @set by default, but we plan to turn this
    off in the future.
  . You can use a new file doc/texinfo-zh.tex for Texinfo documents in
    Chinese.  doc/short-sample-zh.tex is a sample document.  New
    support file doc/txi-zh.tex for Chinese.

* info
  . better support for index entries containing parentheses
  . better support for getting bold text etc. when displaying manpages
  . bug fixed where the first index entry in a file could be ignored
  . M-C-f closes as well as opens footnotes window
  . do not crash if run in Brazilian Portuguese locale

* Language
  . new commands @latex, @iflatex, @ifnotlatex for new LaTeX output format
  . do "@set txidefnamenospace" to omit space after a definition name

* Other
  . build fixed for glibc 2.34