#2878 Installing from maxima-5.35.1.tar.gz requires Makeinfo

[Peter Bruin]

When building Maxima 5.35.1 from the source tarball on a system without Makeinfo, the following happens:

Making all in doc
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/bruinpj/src/maxima-5.35.1/doc'
Making all in info
make[2]: Entering directory `/home/bruinpj/src/maxima-5.35.1/doc/info'
make[3]: Entering directory `/home/bruinpj/src/maxima-5.35.1/doc/info'
makeinfo --split-size=1000000 maxima.texi
/bin/bash: makeinfo: command not found
make[3]: *** [maxima.info] Error 127
make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/bruinpj/src/maxima-5.35.1/doc/info'
make[2]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/bruinpj/src/maxima-5.35.1/doc/info'
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/bruinpj/src/maxima-5.35.1/doc'
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1

It seems to me that Makeinfo shouldn't be needed when installing from the source tarball. The problem is that doc/info/include-maxima.texi is created by configure and maxima.info depends on this.

A suboptimal workaround (where $(MAKEINFO) is the "missing" script if the real Makeinfo is not installed) is the following:

--- a/doc/info/Makefile.am
+++ b/doc/info/Makefile.am
@@ -211,7 +211,7 @@
 all-local: maxima.info maxima-index.lisp $(MAXIMA_CHM)

 maxima.info : maxima.texi
-   makeinfo --split-size=1000000 maxima.texi
+   $(MAKEINFO) --split-size=1000000 maxima.texi

 html: maxima.html contents.hhc

--- a/doc/info/Makefile.in
+++ b/doc/info/Makefile.in
@@ -1064,7 +1064,7 @@
 all-local: maxima.info maxima-index.lisp $(MAXIMA_CHM)

 maxima.info : maxima.texi
-   makeinfo --split-size=1000000 maxima.texi
+   $(MAKEINFO) --split-size=1000000 maxima.texi

 html: maxima.html contents.hhc

Another (better?) solution could be to ensure that a correct include-maxima.texi is included in the source tarball so that it does not have to be generated by configure.

[Jaime E. Villate]

Thanks for reporting this. I have been puzzled for a long time about why the documentation had to be rebuilt every time I installed from the source archive.

The correct include-maxima.texi is already included in the source tarball. The problem started from version 5.23.1, when include-maxima.texi was included in the list of texinfo files, so I have just removed it from there (see commit [158571]). I also replaced makeinfo by $(MAKEINFO) anyway.

[Dima Pasechnik]

The same error is reported while building Maxima 5.39.0 - has this fix been properly applied?