Re: Texinfo 7.0.92 pretest on NetBSD 9.0

[Gavin Smith]

On Tue, Sep 19, 2023 at 07:43:26PM +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Thanks for the analysis!
> 
> On Tue, Sep 19, 2023 at 04:22:42PM +0200, Bruno Haible wrote:
> > * But you can see from the log above that no -I option is in use that
> >   allows the compiler to find the *installed* <unitypes.h>.
> > * The 'libunistring' module puts the necessary -I options into the CPPFLAGS
> >   variable, as documented in
> >   
> > https://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gnulib.git;a=blob;f=m4/libunistring.m4;h=15702811764c2812ad5fe91c2407aff0a55603b9;hb=HEAD
> > * But in build/tp/Texinfo/XS/config.status the value of the CPPFLAGS
> >   variable is empty.
> > 
> > The origin of the bug is here:
> > $ grep -n CPPFLAGS= tp/Texinfo/XS/configure.ac /dev/null 
> > tp/Texinfo/XS/configure.ac:100:  CPPFLAGS=$PERL_EXT_CPPFLAGS
> 
> I think that the first one is not such an issue, as it is set quite
> early, the libunistring module is called afterwards.  Yet it would be
> better to save and reset CPPFLAGS anyway to be cleaner here.
> 
> > tp/Texinfo/XS/configure.ac:152:CPPFLAGS=$PERL_EXT_CPPFLAGS
> 
> This one will do as you say, throw away the -I options.  Maybe it could
> be enough to remove the three lines outside of
>   if test x$disable_xs != xyes; then
> defining those when $disable_xs = no seems actually confusing.
> 
> CFLAGS=$PERL_EXT_CFLAGS
> CPPFLAGS=$PERL_EXT_CPPFLAGS
> LDFLAGS=$PERL_EXT_LDFLAGS
> 
> and, in addition, in the test in if test x$disable_xs != xyes; block
> save and reset the variables.

This shows how using new gnulib modules can lead to problems, especially
under the tp/Texinfo/XS directory.

I don't know what problem the libunistring module was supposed
to fix.  Commit 3ded9f090 (2023-09-01) adds the module but it's not
clear how or why it's used - I couldn't see anything in nearby commits.

Could we not just revert adding the module and that would fix the
problem?