Re: texi2dvi fails in faq

[John W. Eaton]

On 29-Sep-2010, Michael D Godfrey wrote:

| On 09/29/2010 01:20 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:
| 
|     Ugh.  Messy.  Simpler to just have --disable-docs...  Especially since
|     these tools and targets are normally only needed by developers.  If
|     you download a distributed tarball, you should not have to rebuild the
|     documentation files.  So do we really need to put a lot of effort into
|     making this part of the build process tolerant to missing tools?
|     
|     jwe
|     
| Seems basically right. But, I will try to think of the simplest way
| to make it clear that a missing/inoperable texinfo is the reason
| for the ../doc things to fail.  The point of this is to avoid someone
| spending time puzzling over why egrep has crashed, for instance.
| 
| Maybe a test in the ../doc/interpreter and ../doc/faq makefiles?

How about something like the gnulib/build-aux/missing script?  See
also the way it is used in the Automake-generated Makefiles:

AUTOCONF = ${SHELL} /home/jwe/src/octave/build-aux/missing --run autoconf

Instead of running autoconf directly, a wrapper script attempts to run
it and complains if it is missing.

jwe