On Wed, Jan 08, 2025 at 11:51:07PM +0100, Preuße, Hilmar wrote: > Hello, > > I have two small questions, I hope they can be answered easily. > > 1. In the DBTS we got a bug report telling that pod2texi.1 contains > formatting errors [1]. The header of that file reads: > > .\" Automatically generated by Pod::Man (Pod::Simple) > .\" > .\" Standard preamble: > > As the file is (re)generated I refused to accept the patch. > > By looking at a build log [2] however I noticed that the file is not > (re)generated, instead there is a file called pod2texi.1 in your git source > tree. Is the header statement still correct?
It is indeed (re)generated, but not systematically. Speaking only for myself, as I believe we did not discuss it formally with Gavin, I try not to regenerate it myself as Gavin tends to have older software, such that if I regenerate it and Gavin cannot it will be trouble. I have noticed that the new pod2* indeed tries to regenerate pod2texi.1, but so far I systematically git restored the file to the previous version. Therefore, it is indeed (re)generated, but if you want a recent version (that may fix the issue reported in the bug you mention) you may want to regenerate it yourself when building the Debian package. I think that it would be better than patching it, but this is probably up to you and the practices/rules of packaging in Debian. > 2. In Debian we installed the .la files into /usr/lib/texinfo/ until version > 7.1.1 [3]. For the 7.2 packages [4] I skipped them: I could convert some > files using texi2any, so no drawbacks visible until now. > > Are these files really needed? I think not, on GNU/Linux and for installed libraries, the dynamic loading support and use of rpath should make sure that the libraries are correctly found and loaded even without .la, and in our code we do not error out if the .la is not found. In-source and probably for other platforms the .la are needed. Be warned that the use of separate libraries is new and could be somewhat unstable, we had some difficulties getting it right, see the thread here: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2024-11/msg00105.html -- Pat
