Gavin Smith wrote:
On Thu, Dec 16, 2021 at 11:52:19AM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
Hi,
I routinely make my MS-Windows/MinGW builds of Texinfo for others to
use, here:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports/
Recently, a user complained to me that starting with Texinfo 6.7, the
Texinfo Perl scripts won't work unless the binary distro is installed
in the same directory for which I configured it. This is unfortunate,
since it requires users to modify their installation trees and/or PATH
variables to follow my local conventions.
Can you be clearer as to what is meant by "binary distro"? Is it the
files like /usr/lib/texinfo/XSParagraph.so?
I don't understand how the program can find these files if they are
moved from their installed locations.
If they can have a location fixed relative to the script, the Perl core
module FindBin and pragmatic module lib can help here:
use FindBin;
use lib "$FindBin::Bin/../lib";
The above is the example from the FindBin documentation.
For a Windows binary distribution, this type of change may make the most
sense as a distributor's patch, rather than applying it upstream, but
using FindBin like this would also help with running a not-yet-installed
copy. The "lib" pragmatic module adds to the search path and there is
no harm (generally) in adding a directory that does not exist to that
path. (Some high security applications may rightly blanch at creating a
place where a "surprise" could be planted, but I doubt Texinfo has those
security concerns.)
[...]
Could we please resurrect this ability in a future release of Texinfo?
This feature may have worked by pure dumb luck before, but it should be
fairly simple to support explicitly.
-- Jacob
