Re: Current trunk fails to build on MS-Windows

[Gavin Smith]

On Sat, Jan 10, 2015 at 11:05 PM, Karl Berry <address@hidden> wrote:
>     eliz> Either texindex.awk should be in the repository as well,
>
> Could be done.  It didn't seem necessary to me, given that gawk 4.0 was
> released several years ago, but I don't have strong feelings about it.
> What is in or out of the repository is a judgement call.

Seems harmless to include it if it would be helpful. It would aid
people downloading and running from the trunk version, although if
they didn't have the right version of gawk they wouldn't be able to
update the source files.

>     People who build out
>     of the repository should know what they are up against.
>
> With just about every package, building out of the repository has
> stronger requirements on the environment than building from releases,
> and most of those requirements are not tested for by configure.
> Certainly that's always been the case for building from Texinfo's source
> repo (recent autotools, gettext, etc.).
>

This makes sense, as long as we clearly document what is required to
build from trunk. README-hacking mentions Automake, Autoconf,and
Gettext, it should probably have something about gawk as well.

>     Except that any modification will bust us.  This is still Free
>     Software, right?
>

A similar problem would be an update to configure.ac that couldn't be
processed with older versions of autoconf. We can't check for versions
of autoconf in the configure script, for example.

If it is not too hard to make it compatible with earlier versions of
gawk or other versions of awk, of course it would be a boon to do so.
Otherwise people running these versions of gawk could run the
generated texindex.awk, but not update and process the source code. I
don't know how difficult this would be, though.

There is a trade-off between having access to features of certain
tools and making the source files usable to many. A similar situation
would be writing some of the programs in a funny dialect of C that
could only be read by later versions of "gcc". We have at least one
person (Eli) who has had problems with not having the right tools.

However, if the texindex program is bug-free, or if enough people have
access to the needed tools, then we don't need to broaden the pool of
contributors for practical purposes.

A bigger obstacle to changing texindex than the requirement for gawk
4.0 is understanding TexiWeb Jr, as well as Texinfo and awk. The
generated texindex.awk looks simple enough, certainly shorter than
texindex.c, so hopefully it will be correct and not need updating
much.