Re: Octave manual not buildable with texinfo from git master

[Gavin Smith]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 10:24:53PM +0200, Stefan Husmann wrote:
> Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0123@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 5:46 PM <stefan-husmann@t-online.de> wrote:
> >>
> >> Hello list,
> >>
> >> GNU Octave uses a quite complex build system for the documention, so I
> >> am not sure if this issue should be filed here or in the octave bug
> >> tracker. It works with texinfo 6.7, but fails with texinfo from
> >> master. I think this is related to the fact brought up in the thread
> >> with title "Testing lots of Texinfo files".
> >
> > If that is the case could you try testing it after running "export
> > TEXINFO_XS_PARSER=0"?
> >
> > Is there any way for me to try this without building Octave itself? Is
> > the Octave documentation available to download in Texinfo format
> > somewhere?
> 
> Hello Gavin,
> 
> with "export TEXINFO_XS_PARSER=0" the build works.
> 
> Unfortunately you need at least an installed binary version of octave,
> because it is run during build of the documentation. If you install it
> and fetch the complete sources,  "make info" should work.

I have tried to build the documentation.  I had to install BLAS and 
LAPACK packages (which weren't mentioned in the README file so I was reliant 
on Google to find out what these were).

After "configure" finished successfully, "make info" did nothing, so I 
ran "make".  This was taking a long time so I thought I would try to 
install octave instead from my package manager and then try to run "make 
info" again.  I ran "configure" again, remembering to supply the
--disable-readline option as I didn't have a new enough version 
installed.  "make info" still did nothing.  So I ran "make" again and 
waited for it to finish.  This took about an hour.  Then I tried "make 
info" again, with the same results ("preserving existing HG-ID file").

I deleted the two info files liboctave.info and octave.info (with
"find . -name '*.info' -delete"), but "make info" again did nothing.  
Then the file HG-ID and tried again.  This still didn't recreate the info 
files; there was just a warning, "WARNING: ./HG-ID is missing!"  I then 
ran "make" again to see if it would recreate the info files.  It didn't.  
(I have no idea what an HG-ID file is.)

I did this with octave-5.2.0 downloaded from ftpmirror.gnu.org.

It would be helpful if you could give me some more help in building the 
documentation.  I also tried doing "cd doc/interpreter && make" but that 
did nothing as there was no makefile.

Finally, I tried "make doc/interpreter/octave.info" (I don't know if 
that is the right command to use.)  This worked, but unfortunately 
didn't give the errors that you got.  "TEXINFO_XS=debug make 
doc/liboctave/liboctave.info" also worked perfectly.  So I am not 
managing to get the errors that you got.