GNU bug report logs - #79053
epsf.tex: New file

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Message #5 received at submit <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Karl Berry <karl <at> freefriends.org>
To: bruno <at> clisp.org
Cc: bug-automake <at> gnu.org, bug-gnulib <at> gnu.org
Subject: Re: epsf.tex: New file
Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2025 14:37:29 -0600

    The Standards reference
      - Makefile targets 'dvi' and 'install-dvi',
      - a variable 'dvidir',
      - a configure option --dvidir.
    All of these would have to be removed.

Although I have no particular initial objection to removing the dvi
stuff from standards.texi, I wouldn't want it to disappear from Automake
and Autoconf.  I expect there are workflows which depend on it (even if
the final .dvi file is hardly ever/never used) and those workflows would
gratuitously break, causing extra work for maintainers to fix something
that already works.

Furthermore, my experience is that as soon as a standard doesn't require
X, implementations will gratuitously remove or loudly "deprecate" X
(viz. egrep/fgrep). So I guess I'm not actually in favor of removing dvi
from the coding standards.

However ... as far as I can tell, the problem in practice is Automake's
make distcheck depending on make dvi, not the mere existence of dvi
stuff in the Makefiles. So how about if we make that a no-op by default?
It can already easily be overridden to test pdf generation instead, as
mentioned in the Automake manual:
  AM_DISTCHECK_DVI_TARGET = pdf

There's a circumlotion mentioned to make it into a no-op, but for this
purpose I'd simply define a new do-nothing target like:

am-no-op:

And then set
  AM_DISTCHECK_DVI_TARGET = am-no-op

Wdyt? --thanks, karl.

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