Re: LaTeX version requirement

On Mon, Jul 27, 2026 at 01:24:10PM +0100, Gavin Smith wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 24, 2026 at 02:43:49PM +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> > My point is not that we have to use recent features of LaTeX.  What I
> > mean is that we should make sure that a LaTeX document generated by
> > texi2any can be converted to PDF by recent LaTeX, but we do not make
> > promises that a not recent LaTeX can convert the LaTeX to PDF.  To me, this
> > is a lax policy, as it gives us the possibility to generate LaTeX that
> > breaks old packages/old LaTeX.  The main reason is that it would be a
> > pain for us to verify if it works on old LaTeX, while it should be easier
> > to have testing on recent LaTeX, by us or others.
> 
> I agree with not going to the effort of testing specially on old versions
> of LaTeX but it is similar to other dependencies such as Perl - I don't install
> and test texi2any with various versions of Perl either.

I think that it is not the same, as building and running tests of
texi2any with various perl versions happens in OpenCSW CI, github CI
(and Nelson too, though I do not know what he tests exactly).  So, we
can reasonably say that texi2nay works with Perl starting from 5.8.10, which is
relatively old.  Conversly, converting the LaTeX generated by texi2any
to PDF is only done by users and developper occasionally, to my
knowledge, using the LaTeX versions those users and developers have,
which are probably relatively recent. 

> If we knew for certain we were depending on a LaTeX feature that was introduced
> at a certain point, we could document this.

Some document languages support probably require some recent babel
versions, as babel does not support all languages and probably support
more each release.  Most other packages we use seemed quite established,
some are more specifc, in any case I do not know what are our
requirements, besides that they were present in 2022.

-- 
Pat