bugGNU Octave - Bugs: bug #53430, Octave user manual is not...

 
 

bug #53430: Octave user manual is not installed at all on systems with older Texinfo

Submitter:  Mike Miller <mtmiller>
Submitted:  Thu 22 Mar 2018 08:28:29 PM UTC
   
 
Category:  Configuration and Build System Severity:  3 - Normal
Priority:  3 - Low Item Group:  Installation Failure
Status:  Wont Fix Assigned to:  None
Originator Name:  Open/Closed:  * Closed
Release:  * dev Operating System:  * GNU/Linux
Fixed Release:  None Planned Release:  None
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Mon 06 Jan 2020 04:33:38 PM UTC, comment #6: 

Yeah, this is very low priority for me now a couple years later. I haven't really seen a lot of complaints here or users being pointed to this bug, so it may not be a problem that affects many or that many care about.

Closing as won't fix for now, but we can certainly reopen if people care about this.

Mike Miller <mtmiller>
Group Member
Sun 05 Jan 2020 11:17:00 PM UTC, comment #5: 

@Mike: We skipped fixing this for the 5.1 release.  Do we want to fix it for the 6.1 release?  The longer we wait the less important this becomes as more and more distributions will have a sufficiently new enough version of Texinfo.

Rik <rik5>
Group administrator
Fri 04 Jan 2019 09:30:46 PM UTC, comment #4: 

Okay, I'm marking it as WON'T FIX on the 5.0 bug fix list.

Rik <rik5>
Group administrator
Fri 04 Jan 2019 07:51:56 PM UTC, comment #3: 

I think it has a large risk of disruption and breaking the build for users who currently build with --disable-docs. I would rather look at it on the default branch.

Mike Miller <mtmiller>
Group Member
Fri 04 Jan 2019 05:47:21 AM UTC, comment #2: 

This seems like it would be nice to fix for 5.0 if it weren't too difficult.

Rik <rik5>
Group administrator
Wed 28 Mar 2018 06:37:31 AM UTC, comment #1: 

Lowering priority but leaving open. This can be easily worked around on most systems by just installing a newer version of GNU Texinfo in /usr/local or other directory.

It would still be nice to separate the logic of being able to build docs from being able to install docs if they already exist in the source distribution.

I think the easiest way to think about this is to compare it to bison. If bison isn't found, we print a warning message to the user "we didn't find bison, you might be ok if you are building from the source distribution", and let it break at build time if a timestamp has been updated.

For the upcoming release, we are building docs for the users and including them in the tarball, but then configure is saying "you don't have the right version of Texinfo so we're not going to give you the docs we already built for you."

Mike Miller <mtmiller>
Group Member
Thu 22 Mar 2018 08:28:29 PM UTC, original submission:  

This is related to the changes to the manual that use the Texinfo @sortas macro.

It was agreed earlier that we will report an error at build time if the user has a version of Texinfo older than 6.1 that does not support the @sortas macro and they won't be able to build the manual. I think we're all in agreement that that is ok.

What I just realized is that this error also prevents anyone with an older Texinfo from even installing the user manual, even when they build from an official source release that already has the manual in it.

The problem is that the info files are not listed as a build target when (building) docs are disabled, but that also means they won't be installed even if the files are already present in the source tree.

This problem affects Ubuntu 14.04 (the old LTS, still widely used, texinfo 5.2), the current Flatpak runtime (texinfo 6.0).

Mike Miller <mtmiller>
Group Member

 

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    Follow 5 latest changes.

    Date Changed by Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced by
    2020-01-25 mtmiller Carbon-CopyRemoved 80942 -
    2020-01-06 mtmiller StatusConfirmed Wont Fix
        Open/ClosedOpen Closed
    2018-03-28 mtmiller Severity4 - Important 3 - Normal
        Priority5 - Normal 3 - Low

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