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Re: help broken in 3.8.0 ? Missing macros.texi


From: Mike Miller
Subject: Re: help broken in 3.8.0 ? Missing macros.texi
Date: Wed, 01 Jan 2014 14:45:44 -0500
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20131103 Icedove/17.0.10

On Tue, 31 Dec 2013 17:18:47 +0100, JFC wrote:
> On 12/31/13 3:51 PM, JFC wrote:
>> Also, in my previous (3.6.2) build, I was passing --disable-docs
>> but was still able to get help at the octave prompt.
>>
>> Finally, it is sufficient in 3.8.0 to move the macros.texi file
>> to the right place in the install directory to get back
>> the help functionality even when building with --disable-docs
>> so I do not see the benefit of not installing macros.texi.
>>
>> Last point: I redid a ./configure without --disable-docs
>> and I do not see a change to octetc_DATA in the Makefile.
>> I will rebuild with that and, if successful, will report.
> 
> 
> OK, you were right: building without --disable-docs fixes
> the online help system.  Note for OSX users: on OSX 10.6.8, at least,
> one has to override the system's texi2dvi in /usr/bin
> by the one found, for instance, here:
> http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/texi2dvi
> 
> Maybe there is room for improvement here if it is sufficient
> to install a macros.texi file in the right place to have
> help functionality without having to build the whole doc set.

The released tarballs should have documentation already built and
provided with the source. You shouldn't need to pass --disable-docs to
configure and make should not have to do anything when it recurses into
the doc directories. If you find that you do need texi2dvi to build the
3.8.0 source release, this might be a bug.

There is a lot of overlap between the help text that is generated for
the interactive help and for the manual, so there is probably not much
interest in separating the logic for the two. Also because users get the
documentation prebuilt with the source so they should not need the tools
and they should not need --disable-doc.

Hope this clarifies things,

-- 
mike


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