Re: RFC: Top level configure: Require a minimum version 6.8 texinfo

[Xi Ruoyao <xry111@xry111.site>]

On Tue, 2023-08-29 at 19:01 +0300, Eli Zaretskii via Gcc-patches wrote:
> > Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2023 17:45:20 +0200
> > Cc: gcc-patches@gcc.gnu.org, gdb-patches@sourceware.org,
> >  binutils@sourceware.org
> > From: Jakub Jelinek via Gdb-patches <gdb-patches@sourceware.org>
> > 
> > On Tue, Aug 29, 2023 at 04:21:44PM +0100, Nick Clifton via Gcc-patches wrote:
> > >   Currently the top level configure.ac file sets the minimum required
> > >   version of texinfo to be 4.7.  I would like to propose changing this
> > >   to 6.8.
> > >   
> > >   The reason for the change is that the bfd documentation now needs at
> > >   least version 6.8 in order to build[1][2].  Given that 4.7 is now
> > >   almost 20 years old (it was released in April 2004), updating the
> > >   requirement to a newer version does seem reasonable.  On the other
> > >   hand 6.8 is quite new (it was released in March 2021), so a lot of
> > >   systems out there may not have it.
> > > 
> > >   Thoughts ?
> > 
> > I think that is too new.
> 
> It _is_ new.  But I also don't understand why Nick thinks he needs
> Texinfo 6.8.  AFAIR, makeinfo supported @node lines without explicit
> pointers since at least version 4.8.  I have on my disk the manual
> produced for Emacs 22.1, where the Texinfo sources have no pointers,
> e.g.:
> 
>   @node Abbrev Concepts
> 
> and the corresponding Info file says:
> 
>   This is ../info/emacs, produced by makeinfo version 4.8 from emacs.texi.
> 
> So I'm not sure what exactly is the feature that requires Texinfo 6.8.
> What am I missing?

FWIW I tried building Binutils-2.41 with Texinfo 6.7 and it built
successfully.

-- 
Xi Ruoyao <xry111@xry111.site>
School of Aerospace Science and Technology, Xidian University