Subject: bug#59744: 30.0.50; package-vc can't build info file on windows/MSYS2

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 01 Dec 2022 18:12:56 +0200

tags 59744 wontfix
thanks

> Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2022 23:01:34 +0800
> From: [email-masked]
> 
> To build info file one need makeinfo executable, on windows the makeinfo
> from MSYS2 is a perl script, therefore not recognized as executable. When
> trying to build info files `package-vc--build-documentation' will throw a
> "Permission Denied" error.
> 
> There are makeinfo.exe provide by MinGW/MSYS/GnuWin project, but those
> binaries haven't got a update since 2010...I suggest modify
> `package-vc--build-documentation` a bit so that when makeinfo is in the
> PATH but not a executatble, run (call-process "perl" nil t
> nil "makeinfo"...) instead.

I don't like this solution.  The root cause is that apparently MSYS2 doesn't
provide a functional native Windows port of Texinfo that works outside of
MSYS2 Bash.  It is not hard to provide such a port, and the proof is here:

  https://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports/files/texinfo-6.8-3-w32-bin.zip/download

So if MSYS2 folks don't get their act together soon, you may wish trying the
above port, which works for me on MS-Windows very well without any problems
(and I build Emacs all the time, as you may guess).  It is a 32-bit port,
not a 64-bit port, but I don't think this should matter for your purposes.

(And if you must have the latest Texinfo 7 instead of 6.8, just wait for a
few days.)

But tweaking Emacs because of this is IMNSHO a kludge, especially since a
simple solution is already available.  So I don't think we should do this.