Re: *.texi files not generated

[John W. Eaton]

On 30-Nov-2009, Rik wrote:

| John W. Eaton wrote:
| > On 30-Nov-2009, Rik wrote:
| >
| > | Yes, that sums up the decision.  Currently, we require texinfo to be
| > | installed on the build host which isn't terrifically onerous, but we
| > | could get rid of the requirement altogether if we choose to rewrite the
| > | few texi files which actually depend on conf.texi.
| >
| > I'm willing to consider not generating conf.texi, or generating it at
| > configure time and only having it contain things like VERSION so that
| > doesn't have to be changed by hand in the sources.  But I'm not sure
| > how to correctly handle the conditional variables like HAVE_COLAMD.
| >   
| I'll think about this.  I don't know the best way to handle the
| conditional variables either which is why I left it alone for the time
| being.

I did some more work on getting make distcheck to complete and now I'm
thinking that we should try to remove the conditional variables from
conf.texi.

As I see it, we have a some options.

  1. Require that HAVE_COLAMD, HAVE_CHOLMOD, HAVE_UMFPACK, and
     HAVE_QHULL are all defined in order to run "make dist" (so that
     all the figures for the manual can be generated).

  2. Omit the figures that can't be generated (use some kind of
     placeholder text).

  3. Same as 2, except also cache the values of HAVE_COLAMD,
     HAVE_CHOLMOD, HAVE_UMFPACK, and HAVE_QHULL at the time the
     distribution is created, then build new copies only if the cached
     values are false and the features are available on the system
     where the distribution file being built.

I'm leaning toward option 1 since it means that the manual in a
distribution file will always be complete.  I don't think it is
unreasonable to require that anyone making a distribution file has all
the dependencies.  OTOH, we can make it relatively easy to still allow
building without the dependencies (option 2) but I don't care if you
have to edit the configure script or a Makefile to allow that to
work.  To me, option 3 just seems like too much work for little
benefit.

I propose to eliminate the top_srcdir, abs_top_srcdir, and OCTAVEHOME
variables by editing the sources and finding another way to include
the example files in the manual that does not require setting
top_srcdir or abs_top_srcdir in the .texi sources.

Comments?

jwe