decoupling --plaintext and --no-headers?

[Patrice Dumas]

Hello,

I think that --plaintext should be a way to ask for a plain text output,
which would always be not split and sent to stdout, similar with
--html, --docbook, while --no-headers would mean something more restrictive,
that is avoid doing headers, more like --footnote-style, but not necessarily
not split nor output to stdout.

For info output --no-headers would be exactly the same than --plaintext
(mostly for backward compatibility), but for other formats it could be
different, for example for html there could be no headers while still
output in files (especially when split at chapter, for example), or it
could be a no-op (for html when split at nodes, for docbook).

What do you think?

--
Pat

[Karl Berry]

    I think that --plaintext should be a way to ask for a plain text output,
    which would always be not split and sent to stdout,

Well, "by default" rather than "always".

    similar with --html, --docbook,

Well, these don't output to stdout by default.

    For info output --no-headers would be exactly the same than --plaintext
    (mostly for backward compatibility),

Yeah, need to keep that behavior.  --no-headers has been around since
the beginning, much longer than --plaintext, and I'm sure it's embedded
in lots of Makefiles and scripts.

    but for other formats it could be different, for example for html
    there could be no headers while still output in files (especially
    when split at chapter, for example), or it could be a no-op (for
    html when split at nodes, for docbook).

Sure, that sounds like a good change.

Thanks,
Karl