On Tue, Sep 03, 2024 at 09:52:36PM +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> I think that I made that change when I did a review of all the
> distributed and cleaned files. I realized that we did not distribute
> the info files except for info files in tp_api, so I changed tp_api
> Makefile.am such that these info files are also not distributed.
>
> In doc/Makefile.am there is
>
> # Do not create info files for distribution.
> dist-info:
>
> Looking at git blame, seems to be old:
> Karl Berry 2002-08-25
Ah, ok. I hadn't realised we didn't distribute the other .info files.
> > I couldn't find any emails from around that time discussing why the change
> > was made. Patrice, do you remember?
>
> I do not think that I started a discussion on it, because to me it
> seemed to be an error of myself, committed when I did doc/tp_api
> Makefile.am and did not consistently do as in doc/.
>
> Also it seemed somewhat logical to me, in GNU Texinfo there is no reason
> why we could not regenerate info files, which is also why I did not
> start a discussion on that but did the change.
I agree, so we should keep it as it is unless we know there are definite
benefits for cross-compiling (which is just my suspicion, after all).
> > Running texi2any as part of the build from the tarball is likely problematic
> > for cross-compiling. (In fact I don't know if Texinfo has been successully
> > cross-compiled in recent years as I don't remember anyone talking about it.)
>
> I doubt it since it seems like makeinfo/texi2any is used to generate the
> info files since 2002. It seems to me that this is what the TOOLS_ONLY
> and $cross_compiling part in configure.ac and Makefile.am are about,
> there is this comment:
>
> # We need to run some of our own binaries, most notably makedoc, but as
> # long as we have this process, we also use our own makeinfo and
> # install-info.
I was aware of that code in the build system but I did not know if it
worked with the Perl makeinfo/texi2any.
> However, it is possible that it may be broken now because of some
> changes -- though probably not removing the tp_api info files. For
> instance maybe the configure call in if test "$cross_compiling" != no
> should include PERL_EXT_CFLAGS. Currently it is:
>
> env -i CC="$BUILD_CC" AR="$BUILD_AR" RANLIB="$BUILD_RANLIB" \
> PATH="$PATH" \
> tools_only=1 \
> ${confdir}/configure --build=${build} --host=${build} \
> --disable-rpath --disable-nls
>
I guess there could be a whole set of extra variables just for the
build Perl - BUILD_PERL_EXT_CFLAGS and BUILD_CFLAGS in addition to
PERL_EXT_CFLAGS and CFLAGS, for instance. The code goes back to
about 2004 and may be out of date.
(Git commit 75d04b030303, SVN commit 1412).
+2004-10-17 Karl Berry <k...@gnu.org>
+
+ * configure.ac: Clean environment for native configure.
+ From: Mark Fortescue <m...@mtfhpc.demon.co.uk>,
+ 17 Oct 2004 19:09:53 +0100.
+
> I guess that it worked at least to some extent in 2019 as there are some
> discussions on it:
> https://github.com/ElvishJerricco/cross-nixos-aarch64/issues/1
> https://lists.libreplanet.org/archive/html/guix-commits/2019-08/msg01053.html
> https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/76598/commits/31f12acea46d3ad3787bb1ac332dbd2a40739622
Interesting.
