Re: texi2dvi fails in faq

[John W. Eaton]

On 29-Sep-2010, Michael D Godfrey wrote:

| On 09/28/2010 10:02 PM, Michael D Godfrey wrote:
| 
|     Another report with all the details after a few more builds...
|    
|     Michael
| 
| John,
| 
| I have run more builds and done things like forcing  rebuilds of
| the FAQ stuff.  No problems.
| 
| But, I have a question:  would it be a good idea to put a test
| in ./configure which checks for correct functioning of texi2dvi
| and its dependencies (texindex, makeindex, and other standard
| TeX stuff).  If the test fails, tell the user they will need texinfo and/or
| TeX if
| they want the documentation, and turn off processing of ../doc/interpreter
| and ../doc/faq.  (and anything else?)
| 
| The present state has 2 bad features:
| 
| 1. The lack of a functional texinfo is only found  during its use
|      and the error messages can be pretty misleading.
| 2. The failure prevents normal completion of the build (without
|      make -i).
| 
| So, do you (and any others) think this is the right thing to do?  Is
| there a better approach?  Should I take a look at doing it?
| 
| This problem mainly came up due to the fact that texinfo is no
| longer a part of texlive releases,  so having TeX installed no
| longer necessarily provides texinfo at all. 

It could be helpful to have checks for these tools.  What should we do
if they are not available?  I don't think the tools should be required
since rebuilding the documentation from a distribution tar file should
usually not be necessary.  I suppose we should just disable building
(the parts of) the documentation that depend on the tools.  I think
the last time we discussed something related to this, we decided to
just have an all-or-none switch instead of checks for individual tools
and we ended up with --disable-docs.

As long as we are using gnuplot to generate the figures in the manual,
I suppose that the availability of gnuplot on the build system should
also have some effect on whether we generate figures for the docs.  In
the future, if we switch to using (or at least allowing the use of)
opengl-based graphics in the manual, we will need to change things so
that generating figures for the manual is disabled unless we have some
way to create them.

Ugh.  Messy.  Simpler to just have --disable-docs...  Especially since
these tools and targets are normally only needed by developers.  If
you download a distributed tarball, you should not have to rebuild the
documentation files.  So do we really need to put a lot of effort into
making this part of the build process tolerant to missing tools?

jwe