This works for me now. I think the substitution in the '__makeinfo__' function should take care of Forge packages and the 'generate_html' package too.

We could still look at adopting texinfo's @seealso, someday, maybe 5 years from now when everyone has texinfo 7 or greater and it's widely available.

Now I see :

octave:2> cd ../test/pkg/
octave:3> test pkg.tst
/tmp/octave-help-oKulMZ:129: unknown command `seealso'
/tmp/octave-help-oKulMZ:129: misplaced {
/tmp/octave-help-oKulMZ:129: misplaced }
/tmp/octave-help-OaPZAj:128: unknown command `seealso'
/tmp/octave-help-OaPZAj:128: misplaced {
/tmp/octave-help-OaPZAj:128: misplaced }
/tmp/octave-help-EHqmKE:129: unknown command `seealso'
/tmp/octave-help-EHqmKE:129: misplaced {
/tmp/octave-help-EHqmKE:129: misplaced }
/tmp/octave-help-YSLqI0:128: unknown command `seealso'
/tmp/octave-help-YSLqI0:128: misplaced {
/tmp/octave-help-YSLqI0:128: misplaced }
/tmp/octave-help-ml6m5n:129: unknown command `seealso'
/tmp/octave-help-ml6m5n:129: misplaced {
/tmp/octave-help-ml6m5n:129: misplaced }
/tmp/octave-help-5klVhM:128: unknown command `seealso'
/tmp/octave-help-5klVhM:128: misplaced {
/tmp/octave-help-5klVhM:128: misplaced }
/tmp/octave-help-iHndNb:129: unknown command `seealso'
/tmp/octave-help-iHndNb:129: misplaced {
/tmp/octave-help-iHndNb:129: misplaced }
/tmp/octave-help-qvpZ8B:128: unknown command `seealso'
/tmp/octave-help-qvpZ8B:128: misplaced {
/tmp/octave-help-qvpZ8B:128: misplaced }
/tmp/octave-help-ozlfT3:129: unknown command `seealso'
/tmp/octave-help-ozlfT3:129: misplaced {
/tmp/octave-help-ozlfT3:129: misplaced }
/tmp/octave-help-vD04rw:128: unknown command `seealso'
/tmp/octave-help-vD04rw:128: misplaced {
/tmp/octave-help-vD04rw:128: misplaced }
/tmp/octave-help-2cbPn0:129: unknown command `seealso'
/tmp/octave-help-2cbPn0:129: misplaced {
/tmp/octave-help-2cbPn0:129: misplaced }
/tmp/octave-help-XwKdav:128: unknown command `seealso'
/tmp/octave-help-XwKdav:128: misplaced {
/tmp/octave-help-XwKdav:128: misplaced }
/tmp/octave-help-GzlMn1:129: unknown command `seealso'
/tmp/octave-help-GzlMn1:129: misplaced {
/tmp/octave-help-GzlMn1:129: misplaced }
/tmp/octave-help-H5mNqy:128: unknown command `seealso'
/tmp/octave-help-H5mNqy:128: misplaced {
/tmp/octave-help-H5mNqy:128: misplaced }
PASSES 11 out of 11 tests
warning: onCleanup: error caught while executing cleanup function:
pkg: cannot create file /usr/local/share/octave/octave_packages

Dmitri.
--

I pushed a changeset for makeinfo to fix @seealso in help output:

http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/ca5344dd5f1c

That solves the build for the user manual, but it really breaks 'help', and it will break Forge packages, both 'help' and the HTML docs built from doc strings.

I think we have a little bit of time to get this right, because nothing has been released yet. We could talk with texinfo upstream about this, or we could even try using the new @seealso and see how it compares with ours.

Ah, here it is in upstream texinfo

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/texinfo.git/commit/?id=aa18f519e091b6ada0fb2b0a65a51880031d5014

So yeah, texinfo just added an experimental new '@seealso' command, Octave will need to adapt to this on the default branch for when the next texinfo after 6.6 comes down the line.

My recent builds are failing at doc/interpreter/octave.dvi with

TEXINPUTS="../build-aux:$TEXINPUTS" \
MAKEINFO='/bin/bash /home/mike/src/octave/default/build-aux/missing makeinfo   -I doc/interpreter -I ../doc/interpreter' \
texi2dvi  --build-dir=doc/interpreter/octave.t2d -o doc/interpreter/octave.dvi  \
`test -f 'doc/interpreter/octave.texi' || echo '/home/mike/src/octave/default/+build-default/../'`doc/interpreter/octave.texi
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.14159265-2.6-1.40.19 (TeX Live 2019/dev/Debian) (preloaded format=etex)
 restricted \write18 enabled.
entering extended mode
(/home/mike/src/octave/default/+build-default/../doc/interpreter/octave.texi
(/home/mike/src/octave/default/build-aux/texinfo.tex
Loading texinfo [version 2019-03-16.20]: pdf, fonts, markup, glyphs,
page headings, tables, conditionals, indexing, sectioning, toc, environments,
defuns, macros, cross references, insertions,
(/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/generic/epsf/epsf.tex
This is `epsf.tex' v2.7.4 <14 February 2011>
) localization, formatting, and turning on texinfo input format.)
(/home/mike/src/octave/default/+build-default/../doc/interpreter/macros.texi
/home/mike/src/octave/default/+build-default/../doc/interpreter/macros.texi:51:
 Macro name seealso already defined.
@macroxxx ...@the @macname @space already defined}
                                                  @fi @global @cslet {macsav...
l.51 @macro seealso {args}

?

The relevant error message in that mess of output is "Macro name seealso already defined" (I think).

The entire build was done with 'make -j1', so no parallelism problem.

This bug only started appearing in my builds today, possibly due to distro updates over the weekend. Possibly due to gnulib updates?

Marking as confirmed since @haawda originally reported this on bug #55225.