On Sat, Feb 12, 2022 at 06:30:36PM +0000, Werner LEMBERG wrote: > > automake: error: cannot open < doc/tp_api/tp_api.texi: No such file or > directory
I indeed added recently the doc/tp_api/tp_api.texi for distribution as it is useful for the HTML customization API and referenced in many places in the HTML customization API manual. It is not a hand written manual, but it is generated based on the POD sections of perl modules. In addition to being generated, it is possible that the perl module (Pod::Simple::PullParser) needed to generate it is not present. Presence/absence of this module corresponds to the --enable-perl-api-texi-build configure option, and the automake conditional BUILD_PERL_API_TEXI. Also, be aware that this manual actually depends, implicitely, on included files, like api_includes/Texinfo-*.texi generated at the same time as the doc/tp_api/tp_api.texi file. Note that Pod::Simple::PullParser should normally be present, as it is a core perl module. I do not know since when. I think that there are two issues 1. how to bootstrap automake when the file is not present, but the file (and the api_includes/Texinfo-*.texi files) can be generated. 2. what to do to make sure that things goes smoothly if the file cannot be generated For 1, one possibility would be to generate a fake tp_api.texi from autogen.sh suitable for automake with a timestamp in the past similar with what Gavin proposed. For 2., I have no good idea. Maybe we could simply require Pod::Simple::PullParser and make it a non optional dependency of Texinfo (like Data::Dumper, l 64 of configure.ac) to make this issue disappear. One way to avoid part of these issues would be to have doc/tp_api/tp_api.texi and all the files in doc/tp_api/api_includes/*.texi are under version control. We already do that in similar cases, for instance autogenerated man pages. It does not solve all the issues, but could help in some cases. -- Pat
