Subject: automake cannot run without generated Texinfo manual

From: Patrice Dumas <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2022 15:03:38 +0100

Hello,

Please CC me, I am not subscribed.

In Texinfo, we have a texinfo manual which is automatically generated
from Pod sections from Texinfo perl modules.  When this generated manual
is removed, automake cannot run anymore.  To workaround this issue, we
have a generation of a fake manual that contains only @setfilename manual.info 
in the autogen.sh script that can be used to bootstrap some other
autogenerated things, in particular Makefile fragments.  However, this
is not practical, in particular if the generated manual is removed and
the Makefile.am file is modified, one need to redo a fake manual in
order to have things being ok again.

It seems to me that one way to avoid the issue would be if automake used
only the texinfo manual name to construct the rules.  It would probably
be a good thing to do irrespective of this issue, as @setfilename is not
as important as it used to be, now it is fully optional, and we probably
should consider as a best practice not to have @setfilename in Texinfo
manuals.

The manual is in doc/tp_api in the texinfo sources, it is tp_api.texi.

I have not checked, but I think that a minimal reproducer would be
a Makefile.am with:

###########################################
info_TEXINFOS = my_manual.texi

BUILT_SOURCES = my_manual.texi

my_manual.texi: pre_my_manual.texi
	cat $< > $@

##########################################

With pre_my_manual.texi having only one line

@setfilename my_manual.info

-- 
Pat