[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #42352] pkg install fails if --disable-docs is given at build time

[Bob McKay]

Follow-up Comment #4, bug #42352 (project octave):

"IOW, --disable-docs doesn't save you any build steps, it just prevents files
that are already built from being installed."

Please forgive me if I am misunderstanding. I'm not really clear whether this
is a source code or a packaging issue. But it seems to be not really about the
presence or absence of the doc files, but the presence or absence of a
compatible texinfo in the installing system. It's causing problems in a number
of downstream systems (just google "texinfo octave"); specifically, it is
currently breaking octave in macports. 

The problem seems to be that if texinfo is absent or an incompatible version,
the install defaults to --disable-docs, (which then fails as Patric
describes). If this is the intended behaviour, it needs to work (i.e. if
--disable-docs is to be an option, then it should succeed in building octave
without docs, and specifically without texinfo calls - and in particular,
__makeinfo__.m shouldn't be called in the build). This looks to be non-trivial
to fix. But if it's not the intended behaviour - if --disable-docs builds are
intended to fail with an error message - then octave has a hard dependency on
texinfo, rather than the soft one that is currently described. 

Because it's breaking a number of downstream builds, perhaps it needs to be
characterised as an installation problem  rather than a feature request, with
severity rather higher than 'wish'.

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