Re: Texinfo 7.0.90 pretest on CentOS 8-stream (Unicode::Collate)

[Bruno Haible]

Patrice Dumas wrote:
> > https://lwn.net/Articles/348090/ "Re: Redhat perl != perl"
> > https://lwn.net/Articles/348084/ "On properly packaging perl"
> 
> This seems to be an old change that was reverted afterwards.

This thread was in 2009. Since things are fine in CentOS 6 and 7, probably
they reverted it around 2010 (before CentOS 6) and did the same thing again
around 2014 (between CentOS 7 and CentOS 8).

> Something strange seems to be going on, as I use centos 8 stream and here perl
> depends on Unicode::Normalize:
> 
> $ rpm -q --requires perl | grep Unicode-Normalize
> perl-Unicode-Normalize

In my CentOS 8-stream installation:

  $ rpm -q --requires perl
  package perl is not installed
  $ rpm -q --requires perl-interpreter | grep Unicode
  perl(Unicode::Normalize)

Apparently there is a smaller package than 'perl', called 'perl-interpreter',
and this is the one that I have installed. And this package depends on
perl-Unicode-Normalize but not one perl-Unicode-Collate. Why? Probably
because of the size: perl-Unicode-Normalize is 1 MB large, perl-Unicode-Collate
weighs 5 MB.

> Without Unicode::Collate the issue is not only that the test suite does
> not pass, but also texi2any will fail in any case.

Then the right thing is a configure test, that aborts the configuration
with a message like "Your perl installations lacks the Unicode::Collate module.
If you are on a Red Hat distribution, try installing the perl-Unicode-Collate
package."

Bruno