Re: texi2dvi error on -recoder and \openout

[Gavin Smith]

On Thu, Sep 20, 2018 at 06:35:30PM +0100, Gavin Smith wrote:
> Maybe the error message is misleading -- if there is no working TeX 
> program, texi2dvi should just say so instead of talking about -recorder 
> etc. which few people will have a clue about.

With Texinfo 5.2:

$ TEX=foo ./texi2dvi  ../doc/info.texi
You don't have a working TeX binary (foo) installed anywhere in
your PATH, and texi2dvi cannot proceed without one.  If you want to use
this script, you'll need to install TeX (if you don't have it) or change
your PATH or TEX environment variable (if you do).  See the --help
output for more details.

For information about obtaining TeX, please see http://tug.org/texlive,
or do a web search for TeX and your operating system or distro.

With more recent Texinfo:

$ TEX=foo ./texi2dvi ../doc/info.texi
./texi2dvi: TeX neither supports -recorder nor outputs \openout lines in 
its log file

This doesn't look like an improvement, but the change was for a good
reason: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2014-11/msg00011.html

But this is probably not the issue here, as you were not using the TEX 
variable. I assume you did have a "tex" command on the system but it 
didn't work for some reason. If you didn't have a "tex" command at all,
there is a problem that the error message wasn't printed.

Maybe it is a minor problem as nearly all people who have a "tex" command 
somewhere on the path will have a working TeX installation.