Re: Failure building Emacs on WSL

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2018 21:59:33 +0100 (CET)
> From: Angelo Graziosi <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden
> 
> 
> > AFAIU, you should be able to configure --without-makeinfo.
> 
> When is 'makeinfo' used building Emacs?

When the build process detects that your Info manuals (in info/) are
out of sync with their Texinfo sources (under doc/*/).

> If I build with
> 
>   ./configure..
>   ./make...
>   ./make install
> 
> is it really used?

Yes, it will be, by default.  If you configure --without-makeinfo, the
manuals will not be built even if that is necessary (because they are
missing in the build tree or outdated).

Is the Cygwin Texinfo installation really so heavy-weight?  Is it not
possible to install only Texinfo, without TeX?  If you don't have TeX,
you will be unable to produce the printed versions of the manuals
(PDF, DVI, PS formats), but if you never need that, TeX is just (a lot
of) ballast.  So in that case, just installing Texinfo alone, which is
a relatively small package, will allow you to build the manuals when
you build Emacs from Git, and get the latest manuals to go with the
binaries you built.