Hi Ralf, Jose, anyone and everyone, Back on this automake bug report from a mere nine years ago: (https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=7994)
Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2011 23:20:01 +0100 In a package with a texinfo file, distcheck fails when LaTeX is not installed. Instead, it should exit 63(?). I guess I don't exactly understand. Do we not want Automake to require TeX (BTW, as far as I know, LaTeX specifically is irrelevant to Texinfo) for a successful "make dist" in a package with a Texinfo file? It does not seem unreasonable to me. I can't find any specific statement about this, though the manual (Auxiliary Programs) does say that texinfo.tex is required for make dvi, make ps, make pdf, to work, which implies that TeX is required, since texinfo.tex is meaningless by itself. And, furthermore, what would be the difference between "fails" and "exit 63"? Either way the make dist(check) would stop. Also, I can't find anything notable about status 63. Perhaps you meant status 77 for skipping a test? But this is not a test that is failing, it's a whole target (dvi). So I'm confused. BTW, as far as I can tell, it is actually "make dist" that fails, not "make distcheck". It's because of the "make dvi" that you mentioned below. At any rate, I made a test (included below) to try make distcheck on a constructed minimal distribution without tex/etc., and the result is: texi2dvi --build-dir=main.t2d -o main.dvi \ ./../main.texi /usr/local/gnu/bin/texi2dvi: TeX neither supports -recorder nor outputs \openout lines in its log file make[1]: *** [Makefile:342: main.dvi] Error 1 make[1]: Leaving directory '/u/karl/gnu/src/akarl/t/distcheck-no-tex.dir/distcheck-no-tex-1.0/_build/sub' make: *** [Makefile:563: distcheck] Error 1 (Aside: My test sets TEXI2DVI=false, but apparently something along the way is not respecting that, and finding the texi2dvi in my PATH. Didn't seem important to track that down. The only difference is whether the error is emitted by from texi2dvi finding a deficient tex, or /bin/sh: texi2dvi: command not found ) By the way, in the process of researching this, I did find two Automake tests, instdir-no-empty and txinfo-bsd-make-recurs, which as far as I can tell run dvi/ps/pdf targets without requiring the programs. I feel somewhat surprised that that hasn't been discerned by someone's environment before now, but that's how it looks. The fact that distcheck runs 'make dvi' is not documented. Ack, will fix that in any case. Unless we change it. Here is my little test (without the leading comments). ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- . test-init.sh cat >> configure.ac << 'END' AC_OUTPUT END cat > Makefile.am << 'END' info_TEXINFOS = main.texi END cat > main.texi << 'END' \input texinfo @setfilename main.info @bye END $ACLOCAL $AUTOMAKE -a $AUTOCONF ./configure $MAKE TEX=false TEXI2DVI=false MAKEINFO=false DVIPS=false export TEX TEXI2DVI MAKEINFO DVIPS $MAKE distcheck : ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Best, Karl