Subject: Re: bug#25361: info_TEXINFOS cannot be set conditionally?

From: Hans-Bernhard Bröker <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 7 Jan 2017 17:27:32 +0100

Am 07.01.2017 um 16:16 schrieb Benno Schulenberg:
> On Fri, Jan 6, 2017, at 00:37, Hans-Bernhard Bröker wrote:

>>> and only tries to install nano.info and nano.html if /either/
>>> they already exist or makeinfo is available.
>>
>> Again, all you have to do is distribute the files, and they'll be
>> used if they can't be rebuilt.

> True.  But if they are not distributed (like in git), I would like
> the install rules to be just skipped /if/ makeinfo is not available.
>
People using git sources can and should be expected to have more
complete tool chests than others, and makeinfo is well within the bounds
of what constitutes a reasonable tool collection for anyone wanting to
build GNU software from sources.

What can I say? Walking on the bleeding edge will hurt your feet,
sometimes. Needing more tools to build them is just the price one pays
for having the latest version(s) of software. People already need their
own automake, autoconf, perl, m4, (groff), gettext and C compiler.
makeinfo is really not a stretch on top of all that.

> So, if nano.info and nano.html are already there, install them, but
> if they are not and 'makeinfo' is absent, don't even /try/ to build
> them. I don't see how I can achieve that.

You shouldn't.  Pretending the build, much less install, was successful
despite such a lack of documentation is just a bad idea.