Re: Texinfo 4.13.91 on Solaris 9 with perl 5.6 (was: texinfo-4.13.91 pretest available)

[Patrice Dumas]

On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 12:02:44AM +0000, Karl Berry wrote:
>     Karl, what would you prefer?
> 
> I'm not sure I fully understand the choices.

In fact, what I have in mind (but it may make no sense) was to allow to 
build texinfo without ever running the perl programs being built.  One
could even imagine not having perl on a computer and still be able to
run configure with

  ./configure PERL=/some/path/for/perl

and then make && make install works 

> I intentionally made the Texinfo build create the info files for the
> Texinfo manuals, because if the newly-built Texinfo can't even manage to
> do that, what good is it?  Pregenerating the info files would just paper
> over the real problem (a nonfunctional makeinfo with that old of Perl),
> wouldn't it?

Not if you build it for another platform you are currently running.  For
example you could install in a chroot, or do a package...

> On the other hand, of course it would be nice to work with as old of
> Perl as possible.  But I gather there's no feasible way to deal with
> 5.6.2.

No, it's not, because of the Encode dependency.  But, as I said above,
it is needed at runtime, but at buildtime, it is not really needed if we
ship the info manuals...

-- 
Pat