Re: CVS-source build failiture

[Patrice Dumas]

On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 10:49:23AM +0400, ilusionoflife wrote:
> I do following things:
> cvs -z3 -d:pserver:address@hidden:/sources/texinfo co  texinfo
> cd texinfo
> ./autogen.sh
> And get following output:
>       Preparing CVS Texinfo infrastructure:
>       aclocal -I gnulib/m4 && autoconf && autoheader && automake
>       automake: cannot open < tp/Makefile.incl: Нет такого файла или каталога

Indeed, there is something missing from autogen.sh to regenerate 
tp/Makefile.incl. You could try either

touch tp/Makefile.incl

or 

(cd tp && ./maintain/regenerate_file_lists.pl)

> Where is my error? I want to get familiar with source and start tool for 
> converting from Wiki to Texinfo. 

It's not your error, but ours.  In fact we are preparing a pre-release, so 
the configuration/build system may be a bit unstable for a few days.

> Btw, I did'nt found Texinfo to Wiki  tool 
> reference.

There is one, associated with texi2html (at least for mediawiki format, there
are tons of incompatible wiki syntaxes) whose sources are in the texinfo 
tree.  It is in texi2html/maintained_extra/mediawiki.init.  But, texi2html
develoment is discontinued, so this is not the way to go.

The way forward is to port the mediawiki init file to the new parser in 
texinfo in tp/.  There is the issue of the API stability of the new tp/
HTML converter, but in any case the poriting shouldn't be hard to achieve.
There is, however, a fundamental problem in this converter.  Indeed the 
mediawiki syntax is quite well defined, but there are no mediawiki files 
as such.  Then it is very unclear what a converter to mediawiki converter 
should do with respect to out file names, and overall format.  Currently 
the output file name was constructed based on the title, and it leads to 
file names with spaces and special characters that are too problematic, 
and that aren't that easy to import and test in mediawiki anyway.

Advices (or code) on that issue would be most welcomed...

> And one more question - may I use BDS PCRE library, which is not part of GNU,
> to contribute to GNU?

I may not be the best person to answer that, but it is quite frequent
in the GNU project to use software coming from outside of the GNU
project as long as it is free software, (and GPL compatible).  In addition 
to the restriction to free software, and to GPL compatible software, 
in the GNU project there is also an ambition to 'do things right', so you 
should avoid being stuck on a bad pcre implementation or API if possible, 
such that the effort you spend helps as best as possible the long-term goals.

That being said, there are also pragmatic choices that are done, for instance
Texinfo is considered to be the right thing for software documentation, but
docbook is also accepted.  Although Perl is not considered to be the
best framework of development for many people of the GNU project (who
prefer functional languages) it is used in automake or in the new makeinfo
implementation for texinfo here.

-- 
Pat