Cygwin info problem (Was: Lessons from cross-compiling Octave: Linux -> Cygwin)

[Carlos Puig]

Hi Dieter,

I agree with your diagnosis about Cygwin's info problems:

> Thus two things have to be stated with regard to the generation of
info files:
> 1.) they do not compile smoothly from the cygwin port (at least with
what I
> used to compile them, it was 2.95.2)
> 2.) info from cygwin cannot read them even if they stem from a linux -
compile.
> Apparently there is something going wrong with info on cygwin.

GNU texinfo provides two programs used by octave: (1) "makeinfo" is used
during the octave build to generate the octave info files from Tex
source files; and (2) "info" is used by octave to read those info files
during normal use.  To find out what version of makeinfo/info you have
installed, run either "info --version" or "makeinfo --version" at the
bash prompt.

The current GNU release is texinfo 4.0 -- that's what's on my Red Hat
6.2 Linux system.  The most recent cygwin release is texinfo 3.18, which
does not properly handle info files generated by texinfo 4.0, and, as
you suggest, may not even generate proper info files during the octave
build.

The solution is to upgrade your cygwin texinfo to version 4.0.
Unfortunately, as you found out, an out-of-the-box texinfo 4.0 make
fails under cygwin with the strange error about the missing texinfo.txi
file.  I tracked down the source of the error and found an easy fix
under Win 98.  Here's how to proceed:

(1) Ftp texinfo-4.0.tar.gz from a GNU mirror, and untar it into some
appropriate directory.

(2) At the bash prompt, run

    cd <your texinfo source directory>
    ./configure
    cd makeinfo

(3) In this makeinfo subdirectory, change line 106 in file "Makefile"
from

        DEFS = -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I$(srcdir) -I..

   to

        DEFS = -DWIN32 -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I$(srcdir) -I..

(4) Then return to the texinfo directory and continue with the build as
usual:

    cd ..
    make
    make install

Note that the default texinfo 4.0 installation directory is
/usr/local/bin.   Cygwin comes installed with texinfo 3.18 installed in
/usr/bin.   So, to access your newly installed info program, you must
either put /usr/local/bin in front of /usr/bin in your PATH, or
configure texinfo to install in /usr/bin, replacing the old version.
Run info --version to make sure you are getting the 4.0 version.
Either way, you will find that octave will read your Linux-generated
files correctly with texinfo 4.0.

Hope this solves your problem.

Carlos





-------------------------------------------------------------
Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL.

Octave's home on the web:  http://www.octave.org
How to fund new projects:  http://www.octave.org/funding.html
Subscription information:  http://www.octave.org/archive.html
-------------------------------------------------------------