Re: texinfo-4.13.90 pretest available

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2012 19:26:38 GMT
> From: address@hidden (Karl Berry)
> 
> Finally, the first pretest for the next Texinfo release is available:
> 
>   ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/texinfo-4.13.90.tar.xz
>  http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/texinfo-4.13.90.tar.xz

I've built this using MinGW.  See my other mail about the changes I
needed for that to work.

After building, I tried "make check".  This failed in every single
test script (at least the first 40, when I lost patience and
interrupted the run).  The reason seems to be that the test suite
requires a non-standard 'mktemp' command.  I wrote a clone of such a
command (and then all tests passed), but would it be possible to have
any non-standard commands as part of the distribution in the future?

My next gripe is about the new makeinfo: it seems to be built to only
work from the configured --prefix directory.  I did

   make install-strip prefix=d:/usr/test

just to test the new version, but makeinfo refused to work from there,
saying:

  Can't locate Texinfo/Convert/Texinfo.pm in @INC (@INC contains: 
D:\usr\share\texinfo D:/usr/lib D:/usr/site/lib .) at D:\usr\test\bin\\makeinfo 
line 128.

(D:/usr is the value of --prefix with which I configured the package.)

Is there any workaround for this?  On MS-Windows, it is very customary
to install precompiled binary distributions without building them.
Since there's no standard /usr/local/ tree on Windows, end users
install the packages in all kinds of places, and expect them to "just
work".  Is there a way of "relocating" the built package so that its
root is not where --prefix said?  If not, would it be possible to
provide such a way in future pretests?  If the package is not
relocatable, I'm afraid it will be hated by Windows users.

TIA