Re: [Fencepost-users] GNU Texinfo upgrade

[Brandon Invergo]

address@hidden (Karl Berry) writes:

>     You can certainly set up your own instance of GSRC 
>
> Sure, although of course one doesn't need to use to gsrc just to install
> texinfo (or any decently released package).
>
>   wget ...
>   tar xf ...
>   ./configure --prefix=$HOME/gnu
>   make install

Of course :)

But, I would say it's actually recommendable to not only test against
the latest texinfo but also the latest versions of all of the usual
build/development tools and libraries, which would be easiest to set up
in GSRC:

    for d in gnu/{libc,gcc,make,binutils}; do
        make -C $d install
    done

Actually, that may be something that we might want to start recommending
to maintainers: setup a latest-version build chain with GSRC and test
building against it before releasing.  It's also straight-forward enough
to quickly switch to any previous version of the tools/libraries to
check those too.  I'm running Parabola, which always has the latest
versions of packages and I occasionally run into problems building even
recent GNU packages because they are expecting an older version of a
tool or library.  It's not extremely common but it nevertheless happens.

An update on $LIVE/gsrc: I ran it overnight (I'm all connected at home
now) and most of the packages installed correctly.  However I DO NOT
recommend sourcing the gsrc setup script because all the coreutils
programs segfault, meaning you won't be able to do anything in your
shell.  So, I need to look into exactly which programs are broken and
why they're broken.  But, for example, makeinfo seems to work fine.

(imagine my terror when I logged in this morning and I couldn't even do
a simple 'ls'...ahhh crap, I broke fencepost (but then I remembered I
was sourcing the setup script in my .bashrc...stupid stupid))

I guess I have a busy weekend ahead of me.

-brandon

-- 
Brandon Invergo
http://brandon.invergo.net

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