[Texi2html-bug] build failure on Darwin <= 7.9 due to outdated mdate-sh

[Martijn Dekker]

texihtml 1.80 and earlier versions refuse to build on Darwin 7.9 (Mac 
OS X 10.3) and earlier due to an outdated version of `mdate-sh' 
included in the distribution, which breaks on this OS:

$ ./mdate-sh ./configure.ac
03:44 January ./configure.ac

(Expected output: 2 January 2009)

This leads to a build failure while trying to build the man page:

$ make
Making all in .
/bin/sh ./buildt2h.sh texi2html texi2html_configured.pl MySimple.pm 
T2h_i18n.pm texi2html.init translations.pl examples/l2h.init 
T2h_l2h.pm
regenerating texi2html from MySimple.pm T2h_i18n.pm texi2html.init 
translations.pl texi2html_configured.pl examples/l2h.init T2h_l2h.pm
chmod a+x texi2html
Making all in doc
Generating texi2html.1...
sed: 1: "s/address@hidden@]/03 ...": bad flag in substitute command: 'c'
make[1]: *** [texi2html.1] Error 1
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1

Solution is to replace both included copies of mdate-sh (in the main 
directory and in doc/) by a newer version, such as the version 
2007-03-30.02 (I found it included in the automake-1.10 
distribution), which supports Darwin's odd `ls' output format. After 
rerunning `configure', the build succeeds then.

(FYI, I ran into this while building texi2html 1.78 as a dependency 
of tetex in MacPorts.)

Hope this helps,

- Martijn Dekker, Groningen, Netherlands