Re: [help-texinfo] Problem building TeXinfo on MSWindow 2000 + mingw

[Karl Berry]

Hi Vincent,

    I could not find this by searching the archive.

Thanks for searching.  And putting in so much effort on it already.

    First problem I met is that, during compilation of install-info,
    regex.h could not be found.

regex.h has been a standard header for a lot of years now.  Does
#include <regex.h> really fail in mingw without a special -I?
This doesn't sound right for such a  new platform.

I intentionally left the #include unconditional just to see what would
happen.  (It's been there for a couple of releases now.)

Anyway, we could incorporate regex from gnulib, which would probably
solve it.

    LIBS = -lregex

Here again, regex is supposed to be a standard part of libc, so if mingw
doesn't provide it, that doesn't sound right.

    man.c:23:23: sys/ioctl.h: No such file or directory

If you just comment out that #include, does it go through?
(Although I bet there will be other terminal problems.)

    However when I compile a .texi it does work only if I give the full
    path to non-installed makeinfo.exe, and if I try to use the
    installed makeinfo.exe the .texi does not compile. It seems that
    installation of makeinfo cannot be made independently from TeXinfo
    other module installation. Is that normal ?

No, it's not normal; it's a total mystery, in fact.  There are no "other
modules"; makeinfo is a self-contained binary, and does not care about
where it is installed.  Maybe something about mingw shared libs?

    PS: Maybe it would be better with 4.13a. Which one is the more recent ? 

4.13a is exactly the same code as 4.13.  The only difference is that
some doc files (doc/refcard) were missing in the 4.13 tarball.

    is 4.13a some alpha version preceding 4.13 ?

Alpha versions are put on alpha.gnu.org/texinfo.

Best,
Karl