Re: How to prevent distribution of `texinfo.tex`

[Nick Bowler]

On 2021-06-23, Werner LEMBERG <wl@gnu.org> wrote:
>>>> Yeah, it would be nice to have a means to control that.
>>
>> Yes it is really not a good solution in this case.  The file is
>> detected at "automake" time and the rule to distribute texinfo.tex
>> is baked into the generated Makefile.in.  That then gets bundled up
>> into the tarball.
>
> Yep.  The size of `texinfo.tex` (374kByte) is not significant today,
> but if there is no Texinfo documentation in a project it is completely
> pointless to include it.
>
> I vote for removing this file from the list of mandatory files.

It's not mandatory.  It only gets included when the file is present in
your development workspace (presumably by some mistake?) when you run
automake.  I don't know how you ended up with it there in the first
place but simply delete texinfo.tex from your workspace and re-run
automake: now it won't be included in the distribution (problem solved?).

I'm afraid I'm not really understanding why this is an issue.

Removing anything from this list will just break any projects that
depend on the current behaviour when they switch to a new version
of Automake, probably in subtle and hard-to-notice ways.

Cheers,
  Nick