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Re: Directory names hard-coded in Texinfo Perl scripts


From: Jacob Bachmeyer
Subject: Re: Directory names hard-coded in Texinfo Perl scripts
Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2021 17:52:45 -0600
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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




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