Re: Texinfo 7.0.90 pretest on CentOS 8-stream (Unicode::Collate)

[Patrice Dumas]

On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 09:13:25PM +0100, Gavin Smith wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 05:11:07PM +0200, Bruno Haible wrote:
> > 
> > The packaging source code for this module is here:
> > https://git.centos.org/rpms/perl/blob/c8s/f/SPECS/perl.spec
> > lines 2816..2832. Apparently they intended Unicode::Collate to be packaged
> > as a separate dnf package.
> 
> I found some pages that might give some background (CentOS is related
> to Red Hat distributions):
> 
> https://lwn.net/Articles/348090/ "Re: Redhat perl != perl"
> https://lwn.net/Articles/348084/ "On properly packaging perl"

This seems to be an old change that was reverted afterwards.

Something strange seems to be going on, as I use centos 8 stream and here perl
depends on Unicode::Normalize:

$ rpm -q --requires perl | grep Unicode-Normalize
perl-Unicode-Normalize

> > For comparison, here are the results for older CentOS distributions:
> >   - CentOS 8: The same 52 test failures.
> >   - CentOS 7: "make check" passes.
> >   - CentOS 6: "make check" passes.
> > 
> 
> 
> > You could, at configure time, test what's the exit code of 'perl' when
> > run with 1-line input:
> >   use Unicode::Collate;
> > 
> 
> That would be okay as long as missing Unicode::Collate was the only
> missing module.  Does the test suite pass if that module is installed?

Without Unicode::Collate the issue is not only that the test suite does
not pass, but also texi2any will fail in any case.

We already have a test in configure.ac that we have the perl version
requirement, maybe it could be added there:

AC_MSG_CHECKING([Perl version and modules])
if $PERL -e "use 5.008_001; use Encode; use Data::Dumper" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
  perl_version_requirement='yes'
else
  perl_version_requirement='no'
fi

-- 
Pat