On Sat, Dec 20, 2025 at 07:49:30AM -0800, Raymond Toy wrote:
> While trying to build texinfo in a Docker image, I found out that the Docker
> image didn't have gettext, gperf, or gawk installed. Took me a while to
> figure out why texinfo wasn't building.
>
> AFAICT, these are required to build texinfo. Or at least I couldn't find any
> obvious configure option so that these aren't needed.
>
> Should configure check that at least these programs exist? (Now, I have to
> go figure out how to get the Docker image to include these packages.)
>
> ​
It's the usual story that these tools shouldn't be required when building
from a tarball distribution, but they may be required when building from
a git repository. This is noted in the top-level "README-hacking" file:
Development tools
-----------------
This distribution uses whatever versions of Automake, Autoconf, and
Gettext are listed in NEWS; usually the latest official releases. If
you are getting the sources from the development repository (or change
configure.ac), you'll need to have these tools installed to (re)build.
You'll also need help2man (for building man pages) and gperf (for building
"unicase/*" and "uninorm/*" modules from gnulib). If you modify
texindex/ti.twjr, you'll need gawk >= 4.0. All of these programs are
available from https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu. You'll also need pod2man
for building a man page, which should be part of the Perl core
distribution. To regenerate the languages codes you'll need the
Text::CSV Perl module, gperf, wget and access to the internet.
