Re: [Groff] groff CVS now needs texinfo 4.8

[Alejandro López-Valencia]

Keith MARSHALL wrote:

> I never had any success using the groff CVS, as it *should* be used,
> on MS-Windows, even using Cygwin -- I suspect a corporate firewall
> may be blocking the SSH data stream :-(
>
> But, back on the original topic, texinfo 4.8 builds OOTB with Cygwin.
> This provides a mechanism for MS-Windows users to build groff from CVS,
> *without* resorting to obtaining pre-built info files from elsewhere :-)
> I'm not sure how well it will cope with building a non-Cygwin dependent
> groff though -- by adding `-mno-cygwin' to the CFLAGS -- I haven't
> tried that yet.
You can, with some caveats that apply to any other auto-tooled source 
code that you may try to cross-compile as a native win32 application.

The main problem with pseudo-cross-compilation of Mingw under Cygwin is 
that the latter uses POSIX paths while the Mingw compilers and resulting 
binaries expect DOS paths with drive letters and all. The GNU make port 
does allow you switch from POSIX to DOS and back but it just contributes 
to the mess. What I do is a little dirty trick with relative path 
positioning: To make sure that both Windows and Cygwin find the files in 
a common path, and that path is, well... The root.

This is what I do:

1. Place the source code file directories in the file system root where 
you have installed Cygwin[1]. If you placed Cygwin somewhere different 
to the place suggested by the network installer (<disk letter>:\Cygwin) 
you are too clever for your own good. Remove Cygwin and install properly.

2. Mount the source code directory in the root of the Cygwin partition 
(mount "c:\groff-cvs" /groff-cvs works fine). Mount your target 
directory in there as well (e.g., mount "c:\groff" /groff)

3. Operate within /groff-cvs, configure your prefix to /groff, 
configure, compile and install. When the relocation patch be in place, 
you'll be able to move the whole thing anywhere, in the meantime you'll 
have to play with environment variables to relocate.

> BTW, while the texinfo build completes successfully, a `make check'
> reports a failure of the `no-header' test.  This isn't a problem with
> texinfo itself, but rather in the Cygwin emulation of /dev/null, to
[snip]

>Perhaps I should also raise the issue with the Cygwin developers,
[snip]

You can report the bugs without being subscribed to either (just make 
sure to use a mail account you can dispose of, because of the spam... Or 
use some mailinator setup or similar). Anyway, I'd don my steel 
underwear before trying the Cygwin lists. There is a lot of vitriolic 
frustration in there.

[1] If using NT5.x you can create reparsing points from wherever you 
store the actual directories to the root, use junction.exe from 
sysinternals.com for this.