Should makeinfo be required for Octave?

[John W. Eaton]

On  7-Aug-2012, Rik wrote:

| I'm working on this bug report (https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?36903) where
| configure does not check for the presence of makeinfo.  makeinfo is
| required during the build if you want to create any documentation. 
| However, it is also a runtime dependency for reading the documentation. 
| Even if we package a tar ball with all the documentation pre-built, the end
| user will still need makeinfo to make use of it.  I'm, therefore, leaning
| towards requiring makeinfo at configure time.  Note that this is only about
| makeinfo, not a full Texinfo install with texi2pdf, etc.  Attached is a
| proposed patch.  Are there any comments?

I think this is a reasonable change.  The requirement of makeinfo is
similar to the requirement of gnuplot and we check for that in the
configure script.  So we should be checking for makeinfo as well.

| ----------------------------------------------------------------------
| diff -r 067699edef86 configure.ac
| --- a/configure.ac    Tue Aug 07 13:34:22 2012 -0700
| +++ b/configure.ac    Tue Aug 07 18:14:04 2012 -0700
| @@ -2058,6 +2058,8 @@
|  OCTAVE_PROG_GPERF
|  
|  OCTAVE_PROG_GHOSTSCRIPT
| +## Check for makeinfo.  Bug #36903
| +OCTAVE_PROG_MAKEINFO

A nit: I don't think this comment is necessary.

Thanks,

jwe