Bug#183860: RMS's comment on this bug is mostly irrelevant. :-/

[Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>]

Simon Law <sfllaw@debian.org> writes:

> Hmm...  That's not _technically_ true.  Indeed, Texinfo in its most
> primitive form is merely a TeX macro package, much like LaTeX.  The fact
> that you use a program like texi2dvi to generate it is merely an
> implementation detail.

I don't entirely agree for this reason:  texi2dvi and related tools aren't
the only ones that process texinfo source, and many of the commonly used
tools don't use TeX at all.  So while you *can* use raw TeX in a texinfo
document, you're actually breaking the texinfo format and the resulting
document won't work with makeinfo and all the other texinfo tools.

It's certainly true that TeX doesn't have any sort of real program
vs. data boundary in its implementation, and as such it's hard to enforce
any such distinction in the input of anything using TeX as a platform, but
texinfo by specification and implementation actually tries pretty hard to
do so.  I view these sorts of tricks similar to the =for or =begin escapes
in POD that let you insert raw formatting codes for some output language
in the document at the cost of having them not work for all possible POD
outputs.

This is probably all a side discussion, though, since I think the real
question comes down to whether the output from texi2dvi actually includes
portions of texinfo.tex or only the results of running the texinfo.tex
program.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>