Re: Texinfo 7.1 released

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0123@gmail.com>
> Date: Sun, 22 Oct 2023 13:35:19 +0100
> Cc: bug-texinfo@gnu.org
> 
> On Sun, Oct 22, 2023 at 12:06:21PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> >   . makeinfo is painfully slow.  For example, building the ELisp
> >     manual that is part of Emacs takes a whopping 82.3 sec.  By
> >     contrast, Texinfo-7.0.3 takes just 20.7 sec.  And this is with
> >     Perl extensions being used!  What could explain such a performance
> >     regression? perhaps the use of libunistring or some other code
> >     that handles non-ASCII characters?
> 
> It could be the use of Unicode collation for sorting document indices.

Can index sorting take more than a 1 minute?

> First, check that the Perl extension modules are actually being used.  Try
> setting the TEXINFO_XS environment variable to "require" or "debug".

I don't need to do that, I already verified that extensions are used
when I worked on the pretests (which, as you might remember, caused
Perl to crash at first).

> Otherwise, the easiest way of turning off the Unicode collation is
> patching the source code:
> 
> --- a/tp/Texinfo/Structuring.pm
> +++ b/tp/Texinfo/Structuring.pm
> @@ -2604,7 +2604,7 @@ sub setup_sortable_index_entries($$$$$;$)
>    my $collator;
>    eval { require Unicode::Collate; Unicode::Collate->import; };
>    my $unicode_collate_loading_error = $@;
> -  if ($unicode_collate_loading_error eq '') {
> +  if (0 || $unicode_collate_loading_error eq '') {
>      $collator = Unicode::Collate->new(%collate_options);
>    } else {
>      $collator = Texinfo::CollateStub->new();
> 
> This should use the 'cmp' Perl operator instead of the more complicated
> Unicode collation algorithm.

How can I run makeinfo uninstalled, from the texinfo-7.1 source tree?
The version that is currently installed here is v7.0.3, as I must be
able to produce manuals in reasonable times as part of my work on
Emacs and other projects, so I uninstalled 7.1 when I found these
problems.

> (Incidently 20.7 seconds for Texinfo 7.0.3 is still longer than I would
> expect.  On my system the same manual is processed in 5-6 seconds, on
> GNU/Linux on a fairly cheap Acer laptop.)

That is of secondary importance for me at this time.