[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #48172] doc build fails with texi2dvi/texi2pdf errors on Ubuntu 14.04

[Mike Miller]

Follow-up Comment #45, bug #48172 (project octave):

I can describe what I know about how this is supposed to work.

The upstream project GNU Texinfo contains the file of macros texinfo.tex that
is maintained and improved within that project. It is a standalone file that
can be included by any project when building their docs.

The GNU projects automake and gnulib both fetch texinfo.tex from the Texinfo
project periodically and include the latest file verbatim in their
repositories to be released with their code bases.

Octave uses automake to build, which looks first for a texinfo.tex file in
Octave's build-aux directory, and if it's not found, it copies the texinfo.tex
from its own repository (/usr/share/automake-VERSION) into Octave's build-aux
and proceeds to build with that. So an automake-based project is *never* going
to use the texinfo.tex file that is installed in /usr/share/texmf/tex/texinfo
directory, the way I understand how the components work together.

Octave used to include its own hand-copied texinfo.tex file, but that was
dropped recently because it had not been updated in years and was getting old
and bit-rotten. IMHO that is not a maintainable solution.

No one has yet volunteered to pose a question on the texinfo project mailing
list, which I think is the way to go forward on this.

I think it would also be reasonable for someone to create a small demo project
that uses gnulib master to remove Octave from the equation and demonstrate
that this error is a bug with one of those two projects.

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