Re: info-stnd and (info) discrepancy: Searching the Autoconf v2.71 manual for AC_CHECK_ALIGNOF in the index fails

[Arsen Arsenović]

Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0123@gmail.com> writes:

> On Mon, Mar 20, 2023 at 12:07:03PM +0100, Arsen Arsenović wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I opened the standalone info viewer and pointed it at `autoconf-2.71'
>> (which is where Gentoo installs the Autoconf v2.71 manual).
>> 
>> Typing 'i AC_CHECK_ALIGNOF RET' in Emacs brings me to the documentation
>> for AC_CHECK_ALIGNOF, as expected; however, in the standalone Info
>> viewer, I get the "No indices found" message.
>> 
>> I haven't had a chance to investigate this further, but I'm posting here
>> for tracking.
>> 
>> For reference, here's the actual Info file:
>> https://dev.gentoo.org/~arsen/autoconf-2.71.info
>
> You can see that some nodes appear to be inaccessible in the file at
> the link you sent.  Everything from "make -k Status" onwards is
> inaccessible, including the index nodes.
>
> This is very likely an issue with Tags Table at the end of the file.
>
> I downloaded autoconf.texi and associated files from gnu.org and rebuilt
> with a development version of texi2any and I didn't reproduce the problem.
>
> I downloaded autoconf-2.71.tar.xz from ftp.gnu.org and could open the
> contained autoconf.info file with no problems (it also had the curly
> quotes).
>
> Diffing this working file (with the curly quotes) with your failing
> file reveals the only difference appears to be the use of "-2.71"
> suffixes throughout the file.  I am attaching the result of
>
> diff autoconf-2.71/doc/autoconf.info autoconf-2.71.info
>  
> Is there any chance than any Gentoo build process has modified the files
> to add this string in?  This is incorrect as it makes Tag Table offsets
> incorrect.

Hm, I think you're spot on.. the file is mangled by a build script.  I
missed it since it was behind a layer of abstraction[1].

Sorry for the noise!

I wonder if I just got lucky in Emacs wrt being able to read that index
search I did..

That leaves a question of what to do with "slotted" installs and info
pages.  Mangling a binary format by injecting bytes into it to version
the names seems wrong.  A dedicated mangler rather than `sed' could be
used, that can handle fixing up offsets in the tag table, but that
retains broken xrefs in other documents.

Maybe we should toss the thing out and just use INFO_PATH to pick up on
the latest version, like we do for gcc, which avoids all of those issues
but leaves us with shadowed pages for older versions.

Do you have any alternative proposals?

I've filed a bug[2] in Gentoo to track this.

Apologies again for the noise, have a lovely night.

[1]: 
https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/eclass/toolchain-autoconf.eclass?id=82de110d4512494ef2a1a47db4efb5d04c2410a8#n55
[2]: https://bugs.gentoo.org/902461
-- 
Arsen Arsenović

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