Re: Directory names hard-coded in Texinfo Perl scripts

[Jacob Bachmeyer]

Gavin Smith wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 16, 2021 at 11:52:19AM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>   
> > Hi,
> >
> > I routinely make my MS-Windows/MinGW builds of Texinfo for others to
> > use, here:
> >
> >   https://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports/
> >
> > Recently, a user complained to me that starting with Texinfo 6.7, the
> > Texinfo Perl scripts won't work unless the binary distro is installed
> > in the same directory for which I configured it.  This is unfortunate,
> > since it requires users to modify their installation trees and/or PATH
> > variables to follow my local conventions.
> >     
>
> Can you be clearer as to what is meant by "binary distro"?  Is it the
> files like /usr/lib/texinfo/XSParagraph.so?
>
> I don't understand how the program can find these files if they are
> moved from their installed locations.
>   

If they can have a location fixed relative to the script, the Perl core 
module FindBin and pragmatic module lib can help here:

use FindBin;
use lib "$FindBin::Bin/../lib";

The above is the example from the FindBin documentation.

For a Windows binary distribution, this type of change may make the most 
sense as a distributor's patch, rather than applying it upstream, but 
using FindBin like this would also help with running a not-yet-installed 
copy.  The "lib" pragmatic module adds to the search path and there is 
no harm (generally) in adding a directory that does not exist to that 
path.  (Some high security applications may rightly blanch at creating a 
place where a "surprise" could be planted, but I doubt Texinfo has those 
security concerns.)

> > [...]
> >     
> > Could we please resurrect this ability in a future release of Texinfo?

This feature may have worked by pure dumb luck before, but it should be 
fairly simple to support explicitly.


-- Jacob