[sr #110503] Autoconf 2.70 problem: gkt-doc/gtkdocize is now unconditionally required

[Marvin Scholz]

Follow-up Comment #3, sr #110503 (project autoconf):

I'm not sure what happened to the documentation but to see what it looks like,
here is the archive version of it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210306043255/https://developer.gnome.org/gtk-doc-manual/stable/settingup_autoconf.html.en

This worked fine with previous versions of autoconf, as side-effect of the new
feature this is now broken. Even if this only ever worked by luck, clearly
projects out there relied on this method to achieve something that seems quite
useful behavior: Keep gtkdocize optional for people who do not care about
generation of the documentation.

Two projects that use the problematic snippet are gnutls and harfbuzz.

Can you clarify what you mean by self-contained example? All it takes is to
create a configure.ac with the snippet I quoted in the previous comment and
run
autoreconf -fiv.

A possible workaround for other people stumbling over this bug report is to
set gtkdocize via an env variable to a different "dummy" tool:

GTKDOCIZE=false autoreconf -fiv

Even if this is now what it is and can not be fixed or there is no desire to,
it would be quite helpful for autoreconf to fail with a more descriptive error
than:

> Can't exec "gtkdocize": No such file or directory at
/usr/share/autoconf/Autom4te/FileUtils.pm line 293. 
> autoreconf: error: gtkdocize failed with exit status: 2 

Something like:

> gtkdocize is required by this project but could not be found 

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