I was looking at HTML.pm to check that the rules were what I thought they were for the names of output files for split HTML output. I find there are quite a lot of customization variables that affect this, including:
NODE_FILENAMES NODE_FILE_EXTENSION TOP_NODE_FILE TOP_NODE_FILE_TARGET USE_SETFILENAME_EXTENSION I wonder if some or all of these can be removed in order to make the code simpler and clearer. NODE_FILENAMES (and the --node-filenames option) seems to be a holdover from texi2html, before node filenames were named in a predictable way. The only use I can think of for NODE_FILE_EXTENSION is to use ".htm" instead of ".html" on MS-DOS - not worth worrying about. TOP_NODE_FILE and TOP_NODE_FILE_TARGET should always be "index" (basename of file containing "Top" node). It is not useful to set USE_SETFILENAME_EXTENSION explicitly (the extension to the argument to @setfilename, usually .info, is only used for Info output). I tried looking through mailing list archives to see if there was any discussion on the need for any of these, but didn't see anything. In general, removing useless customization variables is a good thing, as it makes the code clearer, and makes useful customization variables easier to notice in the manual. I am not in a rush to remove as many customization variables as possible, but removing a few at a time seems like a good idea. It would help to hold down the complexity of the Texinfo project, and improve its long-term maintainability, even as it possibily gets more complex in other areas.
