bug#41009: Add release date to the title page of Emacs manual (PDF)

bug#41009: Add release date to the title page of Emacs manual (PDF)

[Sebastian Urban]

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Hello list,

I would like to suggest adding a release date to the title page of PDF
version of the Emacs manual.  Five variants below, are all simple
change in EMACS.TEXI, and all would show date under the "EDITION
Edition, Updated for Emacs Version VERSION" line on the title page
(example in attached picture).

First one would show date in "12 April 2018" format:

==================================================
@center @value{EDITION} Edition, Updated for Emacs Version 
@value{EMACSVER}.
+@sp 1
+@center @today{}
@sp 5
@center Richard Stallman et al.
==================================================

Second one would show date in "April 2018" format:

==================================================
@center @value{EDITION} Edition, Updated for Emacs Version 
@value{EMACSVER}.
+@sp 1
+@tex
+\center %
+\ifcase\month %
+\or January \or February \or March \or April \or May \or June %
+\or July \or August \or September \or October \or November \or December %
+\fi\number\year
+@end tex
@sp 5
@center Richard Stallman et al.
==================================================

Third on would show date in "2018" format

==================================================
@center @value{EDITION} Edition, Updated for Emacs Version 
@value{EMACSVER}.
+@sp 1
+@center @inlineraw{tex, \the\year}
@sp 5
@center Richard Stallman et al.
==================================================

Fourth - "4, 2018" (4=month) - setting is similar to 3rd method above.

Fifth - using @set and @value, just like in case of EDITION or
       	EMACSVER.

Variants 1-4 are automated, printed date is the date of system (OS)
when the compilation happened, 5th - I guess - can be automated.

Personally, I prefer 2nd variant, i.e. "April 2018", as in example.


S. U.

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bug#41009: Add release date to the title page of Emacs manual (PDF)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Sebastian Urban <mrsebastianurban@gmail.com>
> Date: Fri, 1 May 2020 22:19:25 +0200
> 
> I would like to suggest adding a release date to the title page of PDF
> version of the Emacs manual.  Five variants below, are all simple
> change in EMACS.TEXI, and all would show date under the "EDITION
> Edition, Updated for Emacs Version VERSION" line on the title page
> (example in attached picture).

Is it customary to show release dates on printed books?  I don't think
I see that on title pages of a few books I tried.

And how will the "release date" be defined, and by whom?

bug#41009: Add release date to the title page of Emacs manual (PDF)

[Sebastian Urban]

 > Is it customary to show release dates on printed books?  I don't
 > think I see that on title pages of a few books I tried.

Strange... Not 100% of them will have it, but the date should usually
be there.  Maybe it depends on country or/and trends?  Look for
example at PDF of Texinfo or Bash or LaTeX2e unofficial ref manual,
although they are not printed.  N.b. printed books usually have some
dates on the next page (copyright page?) after title page.

Informations "who wrote", "what wrote", "release number", "who
published", "when published", should be on title page in my opinion.

 > And how will the "release date" be defined, and by whom?

By someone who builds official release of Emacs manual - his OS date,
if I understand correctly how it works, will be printed there.  If we
want more control then @set - @value pair should be used.


S. U.

bug#41009: Add release date to the title page of Emacs manual (PDF)

[Stefan Kangas]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Sebastian Urban <mrsebastianurban@gmail.com>
>> Date: Fri, 1 May 2020 22:19:25 +0200
>> 
>> I would like to suggest adding a release date to the title page of PDF
>> version of the Emacs manual.  Five variants below, are all simple
>> change in EMACS.TEXI, and all would show date under the "EDITION
>> Edition, Updated for Emacs Version VERSION" line on the title page
>> (example in attached picture).
>
> Is it customary to show release dates on printed books?  I don't think
> I see that on title pages of a few books I tried.

Not as a general rule, I don't think.

But I don't think we should be too bound by that.  Such details can
vary widely depending on the subject matter and also by publisher.  So
I think we should feel free to decide on a standard that works best
for us.

For example, and I don't necessarily say that this is what we should
do, we could just stipulate that a printed Emacs manual (or pdf, etc.)
will have the same date as the release date of the Emacs version it is
for: "GNU Emacs 27.1, released on 2020-05-15".

> And how will the "release date" be defined, and by whom?

Maybe we could ask the FSF if they have a standard for this, and then
follow that?  They are the ones doing the print editions, after all.

There is also the question of who updates the date and when.  That
part should probably be automated so we don't accidentally ship an
Emacs version where the manual has an old date -- in which case no
date is clearly better.

Best regards,
Stefan Kangas

bug#41009: Add release date to the title page of Emacs manual (PDF)

[Glenn Morris]

@today is just the date someone runs TeX. It has no significance as to
(eg) when content was last updated. I don't know what "release date"
means to you. If you mean when the FSF produce a published version, only
they could add that date, and it would not be known at the time of the
associated Emacs release. If you mean when the associated Emacs was
released, then I don't see why that date should be added, but it could
eg be extracted from etc/HISTORY, with some small trouble. IMO the
copyright year, which is already there, is good enough.

bug#41009: Add release date to the title page of Emacs manual (PDF)

[Sebastian Urban]

 > If you mean when the FSF produce a published version, only they
 > could add that date, and it would not be known at the time of the
 > associated Emacs release. If you mean when the associated Emacs was
 > released, then I don't see why that date should be added, but it
 > could eg be extracted from etc/HISTORY, with some small trouble.

I thought that it'll be simpler, merely a question of whether to put
it or not to put it.

I'm guessing that release of docs depend on release of Emacs itself,
but because I don't know anything about how you are releasing them, in
it's difficult for me to define "release date".  So, I would have to
know the sequence of the release process to pick a good place in time,
which, in my opinion of course, should be the release date.

I'm guessing that on day N, Emacs is packaged (tar.gz) and uploaded
to: http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/

But then, is documentation (Info, PDF, HTML, sources package) also
build on the same day and uploaded to:
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/emacs.html

Or maybe documentation is uploaded few days after?

And then do they (docs) stay the same until next Emacs release, or are
they refreshed (corrected style, some minor errors/typos)?


S. U.

bug#41009: Add release date to the title page of Emacs manual (PDF)

[Stefan Kangas]

Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org> writes:

> IMO the copyright year, which is already there, is good enough.

Indeed, books rarely have more information than that.

Best regards,
Stefan Kangas

bug#41009: Add release date to the title page of Emacs manual (PDF)

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

When we publish it as a printed book, we do whatever is called for.
The FSF staff don't need any code in the Emacs repo to make that possible.

So please put into the Emacs repo whatever is suitable for making
Emacs distributions.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

bug#41009: Add release date to the title page of Emacs manual (PDF)

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > @today is just the date someone runs TeX. It has no significance as to
  > (eg) when content was last updated.

The goal of reproducible builds argues for NOT using @today.

(Please, let's not refer to text that we have worked hard on
as "content".  See https://gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Content.)


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

bug#41009: Add release date to the title page of Emacs manual (PDF)

[Sebastian Urban]

Well, I guess we can close this.  Sticking to the date in copyright
section seems to be "good enough" solution.


S. U.

bug#41009: Add release date to the title page of Emacs manual (PDF)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Sebastian Urban <mrsebastianurban@gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 28 May 2020 17:38:08 +0200
> 
> Well, I guess we can close this.  Sticking to the date in copyright
> section seems to be "good enough" solution.

Thanks.

(You can always close a bug report by sending emacs to the
NNN-done@debbugs.gnu.org address, where NNN is the bug number.)