texi2dvi fails in faq

[John W. Eaton]

On 27-Sep-2010, Michael D Godfrey wrote:

|       On 09/15/2010 07:31 AM, Michael D Godfrey wrote:
|     > I will
|     > watch for the corrections which will allow a normal install of the 
latest
|     > texlive.
|     I meant to add to this: including a current texi2dvi.
|     
|     Michael
| 
| This problem, at least for Fedora 13, is resolved by:
| 
| 1. Use of the current texlive-2010-10.  This is described as not yet
|     released, but it the only recent version available.
| 
| 2. Correct installation from the texlive repository. There are four
|     key steps in this: 1) Previous tex or texlive systems must be
|     completely removed.  yum remove texlive is not sufficient. Run
|     rpm -qa|grep texlive to find leftover packages and remove them, then
|     remove  /usr/share/texlive.  2) Be sure that the environment variable
|     TEXINPUTS is not defined in your environment during the
|     install.  3) Install texinfo-4.13a-10.fc13.x86_64 from the standard
|     fedora FC13 repository.  (Do not allow the system to install texinfo-tex.)
|     This installs (currently) a compatible  makeinfo.  4) Download the
|     texinfo-4.13a.tar.gz  from the texinfo
|     website (http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/).
|    Use it to install texi2dvi, texindex, and if you want it,
|     texi2pdf. (These are found in texinfo-4.13/util.)
| 
| At this point a full build should successfully complete the doc processing,
| and the make check tests that require makeinfo should pass.
| 
| These steps are required due to the fact that texlive has decided not to
| provide or support texinfo.
| 
| The belief that the problem as originally reported was due to grep/egrep
| problems
| was not accurate.  The problems were  mainly in texi2dvi, but made more
| obscure
| due to errors in the texlive install (these involved incorrect installation of
| the .fmt
| files, among other problems).

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