Re: Texinfo 7.0.90 pretest on CentOS 8-stream (Unicode::Collate)

[Patrice Dumas]

On Sat, Aug 19, 2023 at 12:23:11AM +0200, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Patrice Dumas wrote:
> > > https://lwn.net/Articles/348090/ "Re: Redhat perl != perl"
> > > https://lwn.net/Articles/348084/ "On properly packaging perl"
> > 
> > This seems to be an old change that was reverted afterwards.
> 
> This thread was in 2009. Since things are fine in CentOS 6 and 7, probably
> they reverted it around 2010 (before CentOS 6) and did the same thing again
> around 2014 (between CentOS 7 and CentOS 8).

I do not think so, reverting that change amounted to rename the perl
package without the modules that make it perl core as another name such
as perl-interpreter, which is the situation today.

> In my CentOS 8-stream installation:
> 
>   $ rpm -q --requires perl
>   package perl is not installed
>   $ rpm -q --requires perl-interpreter | grep Unicode
>   perl(Unicode::Normalize)
> 
> Apparently there is a smaller package than 'perl', called 'perl-interpreter',
> and this is the one that I have installed. And this package depends on
> perl-Unicode-Normalize but not one perl-Unicode-Collate. Why? Probably
> because of the size: perl-Unicode-Normalize is 1 MB large, 
> perl-Unicode-Collate
> weighs 5 MB.

Indeed, this is a small perl that do not contain all the perl core
modules.

> Then the right thing is a configure test, that aborts the configuration
> with a message like "Your perl installations lacks the Unicode::Collate 
> module.
> If you are on a Red Hat distribution, try installing the perl-Unicode-Collate
> package."

I do not think that we should say something like that (if we did, we
should propose to install the perl package actually).

I propose the attached patch.

-- 
Pat

use_unicode_collate_configure_ac.diff
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