[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #49839] mxe-octave: perl 5.8 utf8 module case-folding bug caused by installing symbolic-2.4.0 package

[Mike Miller]

Follow-up Comment #14, bug #49839 (project octave):

Ok, I am able to reproduce this on Debian with some wrangling.

I set up a CentOS 5 container, which comes with perl 5.8.8 by default, which
is affected by this utf8 module bug.

I built texinfo 6.0 manually from source, turned the syms.m doc string into a
texi file, ran makeinfo, and was able to reproduce the same error message as
everyone is seeing on Windows.

If I updated to texinfo 6.1 or 6.3, this error has been resolved, makeinfo
runs without any diagnostics, and the doc string displays correctly.

I believe this is because of the following change mentioned in the texinfo 6.1
NEWS:

> Some Perl modules have been rewritten in C to increase speed.
> If Perl extensions can be created, they are used by default; 
> otherwise the pure Perl implementations are still used.
> Disable at build time with "configure --disable-perl-xs".  The 
> environment variable TEXINFO_XS controls how they are used by 
> texi2any.

Using texinfo 6.3, as I said I get no warning message. If I add
TEXINFO_XS=omit to my environment and run makeinfo the same way, I get the
original error message again. So texinfo 6.1 and newer avoid this perl
incompatibility by building their own compiled perl extensions for some
functions, which are now preferred over the pure perl implementations that
came with texinfo 6.0.

I would guess that updating mxe-octave to build texinfo 6.3 would resolve this
problem, if that's easier than updating or patching perl 5.8.8 that comes from
the msys distribution.

Next I will try to reduce the syms texinfo doc string to a test case that can
trigger this error to appear so we can add that to our test suite.

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