Re: texi2dvi fails in faq

[Michael D Godfrey]

On 09/28/2010 10:09 AM, John W. Eaton wrote:

Although I would prefer to not package externally maintained tools
like Texinfo in the Octave sources (I mean, we don't distribute other
build tools with Octave, right?), maybe it would be simplest in this
case if we just included the texi2dvi script with the Octave sources?
It is just one relatively small script, right?

jwe

This is a possibility, but it could give rise to the usual problems.
There is currently a maintainer of texinfo: http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/
The web page was last updated in April 2010.  The recent change is that
texinfo used to come with TeX.  Now it has to be obtained separately.
(And, right now, it still does not work quite correctly with texlive-2010 and
the script in ../doc/faq.)  However, the most likely need for changes to
texinfo will be changes in texlive.  So, it may be best to leave things as
they are and include texinfo as an Octave dependency.  There are 2
scripts from texinfo that are needed: texi2dvi and texindex.  They are
not very big, but they do some fairly tricky  manipulation.  Octave-specific
version would need to be kept local to Octave (or change the names) so
they would not conflict with the "standard" versions for use with TeX.  This
could cause confusion.

Finally, my claim that everything was working in Fedora 13 and texlive-2010
was exaggerated:  A full build from the current tip ran correctly.  I assumed, but
did not check, that this ran both ../doc and ../doc/faq.  However, this was not
the case.  When I did hg pull; hg update last night something caused the
make in ../doc/faq to run, and it failed.  So, the use of texi2dvi as I configured
it works correctly for ../doc, but not for ../doc/faq.  I will see if there is a way to
fix this without changing texi2dvi.

Any ideas why a full ./autogen.sh;./configure; make does not run ../doc/faq/make
and find something to do, but an hg update followed by make does?  The updated
files were not in ../doc/faq.

Michael