Re: CPPFLAGS not passed to tp/Texinfo/XS on macOS

[Raul Infante-Sainz]

Dear Gavin,

Thank you very much for the quick and precise answer. I am happy to say that with the information you provided, we have set the flags properly and now we are able to successfully install Texinfo. Thanks a lot again.

Cheers,

Raúl

On Tue, Aug 9, 2022 at 10:58 AM Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0123@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Aug 08, 2022 at 04:35:31PM +0200, Raul Infante-Sainz wrote:
> Dear Texinfo developers,
>
> I am building Texinfo 6.8 from source on macOS Monterey 12.3 and installing
> it in a custom directory where Gettext is also installed. CPPFLAGS is also
> set to the install directory where the libintl.h file is present. However,
> during the build of Texinfo, after entering the tp/Texinfo/XS directory,
> the CPPFLAGS are not inherited and its value is empty in the Makefile. As a
> result, the build fails complaining that it cannot find libintl.h.
>
> To confirm this, I manually replaced the CPPFLAGS from the top-level
> Makefile into the tp/Texinfo/XS/Makefile and the build was successful.
>
> It seems that for some reason CPPFLAGS is not being passed to the lower
> level Makefile.
>
> Has this problem been reported or fixed already? If not it would be great
> if it can be fixed for the next release. Thank you very much in advance.

You have to set PERL_EXT_CPPFLAGS to pass on the value of CPPFLAGS.  This
is because in theory, the XS module could be built with a different
compiler to the rest of the project, needing completely different flags.

I don't know if you looked at the INSTALL file but it had the text
"Some of the environment variables listed in the output
of `./configure --help' may be of use for building the XS modules."
Admittedly, this is rather vague, but configure does report:

Some influential environment variables:
  PERL        The path to the 'perl' executable.
  PERL_EXT_CFLAGS
              Compiler flags for a Perl extension
  PERL_EXT_CPPFLAGS
              C preprocessor flags for a Perl extension
  PERL_EXT_LDFLAGS
              Linker flags for a Perl extension
  PERL_EXT_CC Compiler for a Perl extension

Do you think this is enough documentation of this issue?