Re: texi2dvi fails in faq

[Michael D Godfrey]

On 09/28/2010 10:02 PM, Michael D Godfrey wrote:

Another report with all the details after a few more builds...

Michael

John,

I have run more builds and done things like forcing  rebuilds of
the FAQ stuff.  No problems.

But, I have a question:  would it be a good idea to put a test
in ./configure which checks for correct functioning of texi2dvi
and its dependencies (texindex, makeindex, and other standard
TeX stuff).  If the test fails, tell the user they will need texinfo and/or TeX if
they want the documentation, and turn off processing of ../doc/interpreter
and ../doc/faq.  (and anything else?)

The present state has 2 bad features:

1. The lack of a functional texinfo is only found  during its use
     and the error messages can be pretty misleading.
2. The failure prevents normal completion of the build (without
     make -i).

So, do you (and any others) think this is the right thing to do?  Is
there a better approach?  Should I take a look at doing it?

This problem mainly came up due to the fact that texinfo is no
longer a part of texlive releases,  so having TeX installed no
longer necessarily provides texinfo at all. 

Michael