Bug#452582: texinfo: Funny man page for texi2dvi

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Hilmar Preusse <hille42@web.de> wrote:

> On 23.11.07 Chung-chieh Shan (ken@digitas.harvard.edu) wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
>> The man page for texi2dvi is funny.  My favorite sentence is "The
>> full documentation for You is maintained as a Texinfo manual." (:
>> 
> Home made problem?
>
> AFAICT during build the command texi2info is called to display its own
> help, which is converted later using help2man. Due to
> debian/patches/20_warn_missing_tex.dpatch texi2dvi complains if there
> is no TeX system installed instead of displaying its help. No, there
> doesn't seem to be a TeX system in the auto builder -> bang!!
>
> The problem BTW hits the info page too. Solutions? Declare
> texlive-base-bin as B-D?  <gd&r>

I'd rather 

- change the Makefile which creates the man and info pages, so that they
  give an error (before running texi2dvi --help) when no TeX system is
  installed, and

- add a target to debian/rules which executes the corresponding Makefile
  commands, but is not called by anything else in the file.

Thus, we can manually create the documentation before building the
source package, and have it included in the diff.gz (or we could go one
turn further and have it in a patch), but if the documentation is not
up-to-date at binary package build time, and no TeX system is available,
the build will fail.  Naturally, this relies on the man/info pages being
created from source files, not from created files - I didn't check that.

Regards, Frank



-- 
Frank Küster
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)