Re: problems with TEXINFOS

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Dan,

* Dan McMahill wrote on Fri, Mar 24, 2006 at 02:57:15PM CET:
> 
> I'm using automake-1.9.6 and am having problems with texinfo files and a 
> read only source tree.  In my generated Makefile.in, there is the 
> following suffix rule:
*snip*

> Of particular interest is it explicitly goes to the source directory 
> (read only) and tries to create a backup directory there.  Obviously 
> this will fail if the source directory is read only.

Yes.  (This was changed a while ago).

IIRC, the reasoning goes as follows: users should not be expected to
need to have texinfo installed in order to be able to have the
documentation available.  That means the .info files should be
distributed.  That in turn means it is a very good idea to put them
in the source tree: for users extracting your tarball, that will be
the case anyway.  If they decide that they would like to hack on your
package, they should not have the info documentation in both the source
and the build tree.

> Is this a bug or am I doing something illegal to ever trigger this rule?

No.  If you are the developer, then that is perfectly normal.  If you
just downloaded a package, then that rule should not trigger.  I'd be
interested in the system and make implementation used in that case.

Usually, you it works to keep the source tree read-write for changes to
files which are used as inputs to files which are distributed.  (Sorry,
the sentence sounds a bit awkward, but I can't formulate it better ATM.)

Cheers,
Ralf