Re: building groff without makeinfo (was: lots of fatal build system bugs)

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Branden,

G. Branden Robinson wrote on Tue, Mar 29, 2022 at 06:15:51AM +1100:

> I wanted to get your feedback on another point.
> 
> commit aa16fc0fe503e462617b4db2da1e7638bcac77c6
> Author: G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>
> Date:   Wed Mar 2 03:22:40 2022 +1100
> 
>     INSTALL.extra: Update discussion of dependencies.
>     
>     * stdbool.h is a C99 feature, so call out C99 as a requirement.  gnulib
>       might enable us to build even on C89/C90 systems, though.
>     * Record the release date for our Perl dependency, long since
>       end-of-lifed even by ActiveState.
>     * Update discussion of our Texinfo manual since we no longer have a hard
>       build-time dependency on 'makeinfo'.
>     * Tweak wording in uchardet and paper size discussions, including a
>       Kemper notectomy and Kernighan ditroffectomy.
> 
> Building groff from a distribution archive (_not_ from Git), should NOT
> require makeinfo(1) anymore.
> 
> Can you confirm that this is the case on OpenBSD?  One of the reasons I
> made this change was to accommodate the *BSDs[1].

Off the top of my head, i see that gmakeinfo used to be run in old
groff builds on OpenBSD (both when run from groff git and when run
from a tarball in the ports framework).  It ist still run when run
from groff git head (which is just fine) but it appears to no longer
be run in the ports framework when starting from a tarball constructed
with "make dist".

Testing that the ports build indeed works without having gmakeinfo(1)
installed and removing the dependency on gmakeinfo(1) from the port is
on my list of things to do.  I'll check in more detail later.

Yours,
  Ingo