Re: Texinfo 7.1 released

[Gavin Smith]

On Sun, Oct 22, 2023 at 03:58:42PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > 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?

I don't know - it may depends on the user's installation.  When we
first added Unicode collation for indices it increased the run times
considerably (e.g by 20 seconds) until we found some optimisations, which
is why I suspect this module.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2023-02/msg00019.html

> 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.

Running the "texi2any.pl" script should do it.  Alternatively, you may
need to run "texi2any":

  To run the output "tp/texi2any" instead, you can set the environment
  variable TEXINFO_DEV_SOURCE to 1.  Otherwise, it will try to use
  Texinfo's Perl modules in the installed locations.  "tp/texi2any" uses
  the Perl interpreter found by configure, so you might want to run that 
  instead of texi2any.pl if it's different to the default interpreter in 
  your environment.

(Excerpt from "README-hacking".)

> > 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).

I'd expected so, just wanted to make sure.