Re: What is the correct way of handling generated docs?

[Bruce Korb]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> Can't you simply write a Make rule that will produce .info file
[...]
> Am I missing something?

Yes.  :-(   Without endlessly convoluted change (dependency) checks,
the docs get rebuilt causing the .info to be rebuilt causing distcheck
to choke.  So, without distcheck changes, it is necessary to avoid
trying to update the .info file during distcheck, but not at other times.

Even worse, though, is that if there is no .texi file,
then *ALL* the texinfo building stuff assumes that there
is no documentation.  Consequently, you wind up with
bootstrapping code like this:

  case ${BOOTSTRAP} in
  pre )
    test -f doc/autogen.texi \
        || echo '@setfilename fnord' > doc/autogen.texi

  post )
    # remove the fake file so we don't forget to generate it later.
    test "`sed 2q doc/autogen.texi`" != "@setfilename fnord" \
        || rm -f doc/autogen.texi

I call this, "kludgery".

The bottom line is that with the current tools, it is necessary to
trick them at some point, or else wrong things do or don't happen
at the wrong times.