Re: Fwd: Need a Windows binary of the latest makeinfo for a test

[Mark Messer]

Eli,

 

My mistake. I now see the latest versions at http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/ are 4.13 and 4.13a. Both were released in 2008.

 

At http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/texinfo/texinfo/makeinfo/, the most recent source files for makeinfo.c and makeinfo.h are 10 months old. I had incorrectly presumed these were the basis for your 4.13a build dated January, 2012.

 

Thank you for your help. We appreciate your careful building and testing. Octave can use the makeinfo.exe you built.

 

Mark

 

On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 10:44 AM, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:

> Date: Wed, 29 Feb 2012 09:24:26 -0800
> From: Mark Messer <address@hidden>
> Cc: Philip Nienhuis <address@hidden>, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso <address@hidden>,
>       Tatsuro MATSUOKA <address@hidden>, Nitzan Arazi <address@hidden>,
>       "a.dawid" <address@hidden>, address@hidden

>
>
> At the GNU Octave project, there is an intermittent bug that only affects
> Windows installations. 'help foo' is supposed to display information about
> the foo command. It does, but the text is garbled on some computers. See
> https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?35187
>
> The problem was traced to the most recent release of makeinfo.exe, which is
> 4.13 from 2008. The most recent snapshot of makeinfo.exe fixes the problem.

I believe by "the most recent snapshot" you mean the precompiled
binary from this site:

 http://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports/files/texinfo-4.13a-w32-bin.zip/download

If so, then this is not a development snapshot, it is more or less
straightforward MinGW build of stock Texinfo 4.13a distributed by the
upstream Texinfo maintainers.  (In fact, the C implementation of
makeinfo is no longer developed, and instead a new implementation in
Perl is being developed as we speak.)

> The Octave project would like to include that latest snapshot of
> makeinfo.exe in their next release.

Feel free to use the precompiled binary from the above site.

> makeinfo --version reports 4.13 for both the 2008 released version and the
> snapshot. It would be nice to have a snapshot with a different version. Is
> this possible?

The version string comes from the source code, which I didn't change.
The fact that other binaries of the same version crash, while this one
doesn't, is because I built this binary and carefully tested it to
make sure it works.  I guess the binaries that crash were linked with
some faulty DLLs and most likely saw much less testing.  But no
source-level differences exist between these binaries.

Why do you care about the version, anyway?  I'm reluctant to change
the version string without any source-level changes in the code.