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

[Eric Gallager <egall@gwmail.gwu.edu>]

On Tue, Aug 29, 2023 at 11:23 AM Nick Clifton via Gcc-patches
<gcc-patches@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
>
> Hi Guys,
>
>   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 ?
>

Just as a point of reference, but the default makeinfo shipped with
macOS (/usr/bin/makeinfo) is stuck at version 4.8 due to the whole
GPL3 transition. The other makeinfos that I have installed are:
- /usr/local/bin/makeinfo (built manually) is at version 6.7
- /opt/local/bin/makeinfo (from MacPorts) is at version 7.0.3
- /opt/sw/bin/makeinfo (from Fink) is broken for me currently, so I
can't get its version at the moment
- /opt/sw/opt/texinfo-legacy/bin/makeinfo (also from Fink, but as a
separate package) is at version 4.13
- /opt/iains/x86_64-apple-darwin19/gcc-7-5-toolchain/bin/makeinfo
(from Iain Sandoe's package I used for bootstrapping Ada) is at
version 6.7

So, from this survey, the makeinfo from MacPorts is the only one I'd
be able to build with currently if this change went through. I think
that's a sign that 6.8 is too new.
Eric

> Cheers
>   Nick
>
> [1] https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=30703
> [2] https://sourceware.org/pipermail/binutils/2023-February/125943.html
>
> Suggested patch:
>
> diff --git a/configure.ac b/configure.ac
> index 01cfd017273..10bfef1c6c5 100644
> --- a/configure.ac
> +++ b/configure.ac
> @@ -3678,10 +3678,10 @@ case " $build_configdirs " in
>    *" texinfo "*) MAKEINFO='$$r/$(BUILD_SUBDIR)/texinfo/makeinfo/makeinfo' ;;
>    *)
>  changequote(,)
> -    # For an installed makeinfo, we require it to be from texinfo 4.7 or
> +    # For an installed makeinfo, we require it to be from texinfo 6.8 or
>      # higher, else we use the "missing" dummy.
>      if ${MAKEINFO} --version \
> -       | egrep 'texinfo[^0-9]*(4\.([7-9]|[1-9][0-9])|[5-9]|[1-9][0-9])' >/dev/null 2>&1; then
> +       | egrep 'texinfo[^0-9]*(6\.([8-9]|[1-9][0-9])|[7-9]|[1-9][0-9])' >/dev/null 2>&1; then
>        :
>      else
>        MAKEINFO="$MISSING makeinfo"
>