On Fri, Aug 29, 2025 at 09:48:16PM +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote: > On Tue, Aug 26, 2025 at 10:19:23PM +0200, Bruno Haible wrote: > > Gavin Smith wrote: > > > Or > > > maybe the CI could be amended to provide the --without-swig flag to > > > 'configure' > > > on OpenBSD, Cygwin and any others where this problem occurs. > > > > I just did that. No need to spend brain cycles on portability problems > > of hardly useful features. > > Not useful for now, but I think that the SWIG interface should be the > way to have code outside of texi2any access to a parsed Texinfo tree for > purposes other than converting to other formats. For example to split a > Texinfo document in paragraphs and other texts for translation for > example, or to process Texinfo used as code documentation in comment of > a source file.
As far as I can tell, the issues with libtool/SWIG are not fixed on OpenBSD and Cygwin. I saw there was some discussion on the libtool mailing list (between yourself and Ileana Dumitrescu, the libtool maintainer) but no resolution of the issue. So on OpenBSD and Cygwin, the checks for SWIG in Texinfo's configure script, which use the AX_PKG_SWIG macro in tta/m4/ax_pkg_swig.m4, will succeed, but Texinfo's code using SWIG will not actually work, leading to build failures like those experienced by Bruno. Unless we can add tests for the specific problems encountered by the SWIG code on these platforms, we should disable SWIG by default in the Texinfo build; otherwise, users will not be able to build Texinfo without specifying the --without-swig flag.
