Documentation bugs to do with text2dvi

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, texinfo.

I've just installed texinfo 6.1, and am having difficulty generating a
.dvi file.  I've encountered inadequate documentation, trying to do
this.

First problem: I do

    $ texi2dvi cc-mode.texi

, and get the error message:

    /usr/bin/texi2dvi: texinfo.tex appears to be broken.
    This may be due to the environment variable TEX set to something
    other than (plain) tex, a corrupt texinfo.tex file, or
    to tex itself simply not working.

This is a misleading message.  texinfo.tex is not "broken", it is
missing entirely.  The environment variable TEX is not documented in the
texinfo manual, so that bit of the error message is not useful.  This is
surely a documentation bug.

On searching the texinfo manual, page "Printed Books" asserts that

    Texinfo provides a file 'texinfo.tex' that contains information
    (definitions or "macros") that TeX uses when it typesets a Texinfo
    file.

This appears not to be true.  I installed texinfo-6.1 in Gentoo
GNU/Linux, and no such file was to be found.  This is at best unclarity
in the manual.

Later on in this page, it says:

    You can get the latest version of 'texinfo.tex' from the Texinfo
    home page, <http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/>.

I'm guessing here, but it seems to me that texinfo.tex is _not_
distributed with texinfo (why not?) and the user has to go to the
trouble of downloading it separately.  Why does this manual page not say
this explicitly?  I'm not particularly interested in getting the
_latest_ version of this file.  I just want _any_ working version.

Even assuming I do get a texinfo.tex, what am I supposed to do with it?
Where am I meant to put it, and how am I meant to tell texi2dvi where to
look?  Where in the manual is this documented?  I couldn't find it
anywhere.

For now, I'm going back to texinfo 4.13, with which I can actually
generate .dvi output.  It would be nice to be able to do so in texinfo
6.1, too.  The current manual doesn't tell me how to do this in
sufficient detail.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).