Re: Current trunk fails to build on MS-Windows

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Aharon Robbins <address@hidden>
> Date: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 22:06:41 +0200
> 
> Hi Eli.
> 
> > Does jrtangle need a newer Gawk?
> 
> Yes. 4.0 or newer.

Then the configure script should test for that.

> I would expect that the texinfo tarball would include texindex.awk
> ready to go, and not have to run jrtangle to produce it.

Either texindex.awk should be in the repository as well, or the
configure should test for a recent Gawk, perhaps only when
texindex.awk does not already exist in the tree.  People who build out
of the repository should know what they are up against.

> > It looks like jrtangle wants _both_ a new Gawk, and a Gawk that can
> > invoke arbitrary Unix shell commands via the 'system' function.  And
> > that I don't have, sorry (this is MS-Windows, remember?).  So I'm
> > stuck; looks like jrtangle is not really portable to anything
> > non-Posix, which is too bad.
> 
> Again, if the tarball includes texindex.awk already generated, we should
> be fine.

Except that any modification will bust us.  This is still Free
Software, right?

> > Any fire escapes out of this conundrum?  E.g., how about some more
> > portable way of renaming the output of jrtangle, than just using ugly
> > shell commands inside an Awk script?
> 
> What would that be?

I don't know, I just saw this stuff today for the first time.  At
worst, invoke a script, then we can invoke a different script on each
OS.  But I hope a more elegant solution is possible.  (Why is it
necessary to go through a temporary file, anyway?)