Re: help broken in 3.8.0 ? Missing macros.texi

[Mike Miller]

On Thu, 2 Jan 2014 01:36:58 -0500, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 01/01/2014 09:54 PM, Mike Miller wrote:
>> On Thu, 2 Jan 2014 02:27:27 +0100, c. wrote:
>>>
>>> On 2 Jan 2014, at 01:01, JFC <address@hidden> wrote:
>>>
>>>> But if all the doc is prebuilt, a user does not need the tools for
>>>> building it and thus can benefit from the --disable-docs switch.
>>>> Unless using it breaks the help, of course...
>>>>
>>>> I thought that --disable-docs was intended at least to avoid the
>>>> dependency on a latex system (and possibly other tools).
>>>
>>> It it is meant to avoid the dependency on TeX and Texinfo.
>>> The online help needs Texinfo, so if you pass '--disable-docs'
>>> you're not expected to have a working Texinfo ad therefore
>>> the help will not work.
>>
>> That's true, I forgot about the runtime dependency on makeinfo.
>>
>> So yes, the intended behavior is that --disable-docs disables both the
>> manual and the interactive help. Of course all the files that would have
>> been built are already present in the source distribution, so that's why
>> when you use ./run-octave, the files are all found in the source tree.
> 
> We should probably do better here by checking for individual tools
> instead of using an all or nothing approach.  But I'm not sure how much
> effort it is worth.  If you are building Octave from sources and you
> want everything to work, then install the necessary tools.
>
> OTOH, if building from an unmodified tarball requires TeX to rebuild
> parts of the documentation, then there is a bug in the build system.  We
> (mostly Rik) went to some lengths to make sure that the documentation
> would not need to be rebuilt if you are building from an unmodified
> tarball.  That seems to be working properly for me.

That is also my experience, no Texinfo or TeX commands actually need to
run to build from the source tarball.

It looks to me like the only requirement is that gnuplot and makeinfo
are detected on PATH, the absence of either of them has the same effect
as --disable-docs and switches off the make rules to install the help
and manual files.

-- 
mike