Re: Output to directory patch

[Al Haji-Ali]

Hello Mosè,

On 14/02/2021, Mosè Giordano wrote:
> for the record I tried to work on this back in 2013:
> https://github.com/giordano/auctex/commit/9c0eb5d4f2f82f4ff22683ef218727b6a45ae54d
> (I believe this was based on a previous attempt by Ralf Angeli, but I
> can't find a reference for this).  I'm pretty sure I didn't push this
> forward because I faced some fundamental challenges that would have
> made the functionality only half-baked.  Probably Keita identified
> some of those issues.
Thanks for this. I didn't know about your attempt and it definitely has some 
things for me to learn (I noticed that I missed to pass the correct arguments 
in TeX-print-command which I now do).

I noticed that your attempt is for both the jobfile name and for the 
`--output-directory` option. Mine is only for the latter, so perhaps the 
smaller objective is easier to accomplish?

Also your implementation is more methodical and certainly more ideal than mine. 
Mine is based on bootstrapping TeX-master-file to return the correct path for 
output files which made it work 95% of the time but had some unintended 
consequences that I then had to correct.

I think the implementation should work for the majority of cases, but will 
never work for all cases because, among other things, of the particularties of 
tex engines that Ikumi outlined regarding \include and packages that create 
temporary files. Nevertheless, I don't think we should make perfect the enemy 
of good in this case, especially since the user can control this configuration 
on a per-buffer basis.

Best regards,
-- Al