Need a Windows binary of the latest makeinfo for a test

[Mark Messer-2]

At the GNU Octave project, there is an intermittent bug that only affects Windows installations. help foo is supposed to display infomartion about the foo command. It does, but the text is garbled on some computers. See https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?35187

 

The bug is occurring on my computer. I have traced it to makeinfo.exe. There is a problem with word wrapping.

 

Octave uses the latest release of makeinfo, which is 4.13 from 2008. I see the source code has been changed since then. For a test, I would like to replace makeinfo.exe with a copy from a more recent build.

 

Most convenient for me would be to download a pre-built Windows binary, and copy makeinfo.exe over my existing makeinfo.exe. Is there such a binary? I am running 32 bit Vista.

I am assuming a new makeinfo.exe would be able to use dlls without installation problems. makeinfo.exe depends on msys-intl-8-8.dll, msys-iconv-2.dll, msys-1.0.dll, kernell32.dll, and ntdll.dll.  

 

Otherwise, I will follow the directions in the djcpp README. If I need to do this, it would help if you could tell me the command to download a reasonably stable version of the sources from CVS.

 

Thanks,

Mark

 

 

[Patrice Dumas]

On Sat, Feb 04, 2012 at 02:56:26PM -0800, Mark Messer wrote:
> At the GNU Octave project, there is an intermittent bug that only affects
> Windows installations. help foo is supposed to display infomartion about
> the foo command. It does, but the text is garbled on some computers. See
> https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?35187
>
> Otherwise, I will follow the directions in the djcpp README. If I need to
> do this, it would help if you could tell me the command to download a
> reasonably stable version of the sources from CVS.

makeinfo in C is being replaced by a perl implementation, in tp/texi2any(.pl).
You can use the texinfo CVS, it should work as usual.  The latest CVS should
be stable these days.

Getting CVS is explained on
http://savannah.gnu.org/cvs/?group=texinfo

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@...:/sources/texinfo co texinfo

--
Pat

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sat, 4 Feb 2012 14:56:26 -0800
> From: Mark Messer <mmesser314@...>
>
> Octave uses the latest release of makeinfo, which is 4.13 from 2008. I see
> the source code has been changed since then. For a test, I would like to
> replace makeinfo.exe with a copy from a more recent build.
>
> Most convenient for me would be to download a pre-built Windows binary, and
> copy makeinfo.exe over my existing makeinfo.exe. Is there such a binary? I
> am running 32 bit Vista.

Try the one here:

   http://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports/files/texinfo-4.13a-w32-bin.zip/download

[Mark Messer-2]

At the GNU Octave project, there is an intermittent bug that only affects Windows installations. 'help foo' is supposed to display information about the foo command. It does, but the text is garbled on some computers. See https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?35187

 

The problem was traced to the most recent release of makeinfo.exe, which is 4.13 from 2008. The most recent snapshot of makeinfo.exe fixes the problem.

 

The Octave project would like to include that latest snapshot of makeinfo.exe in their next release.

 

makeinfo --version reports 4.13 for both the 2008 released version and the snapshot. It would be nice to have a snapshot with a different version. Is this possible?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mark Messer <mmesser314@...>
Date: Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 6:02 AM
Subject: Re: Need a Windows binary of the latest makeinfo for a test
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@...>

I dropped in the latest makeinfo.exe. It fixed the problem.

Thank you. I appreciate the help.

 

 

On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 10:20 AM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@...> wrote:

> Date: Sat, 4 Feb 2012 14:56:26 -0800
> From: Mark Messer <mmesser314@...>

>
> Octave uses the latest release of makeinfo, which is 4.13 from 2008. I see
> the source code has been changed since then. For a test, I would like to
> replace makeinfo.exe with a copy from a more recent build.
>
> Most convenient for me would be to download a pre-built Windows binary, and
> copy makeinfo.exe over my existing makeinfo.exe. Is there such a binary? I
> am running 32 bit Vista.

Try the one here:

  http://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports/files/texinfo-4.13a-w32-bin.zip/download

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 29 Feb 2012 09:24:26 -0800
> From: Mark Messer <mmesser314@...>
> Cc: Philip Nienhuis <prnienhuis@...>, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso <jordigh@...>,
> Tatsuro MATSUOKA <tmacchant@...>, Nitzan Arazi <nitnit@...>,
> "a.dawid" <alexandre.dawid@...>, octave-bug-tracker@...
>
>
> At the GNU Octave project, there is an intermittent bug that only affects
> Windows installations. 'help foo' is supposed to display information about
> the foo command. It does, but the text is garbled on some computers. See
> https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?35187
>
> The problem was traced to the most recent release of makeinfo.exe, which is
> 4.13 from 2008. The most recent snapshot of makeinfo.exe fixes the problem.

I believe by "the most recent snapshot" you mean the precompiled
binary from this site:

  http://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports/files/texinfo-4.13a-w32-bin.zip/download

If so, then this is not a development snapshot, it is more or less
straightforward MinGW build of stock Texinfo 4.13a distributed by the
upstream Texinfo maintainers.  (In fact, the C implementation of
makeinfo is no longer developed, and instead a new implementation in
Perl is being developed as we speak.)

> The Octave project would like to include that latest snapshot of
> makeinfo.exe in their next release.

Feel free to use the precompiled binary from the above site.

> makeinfo --version reports 4.13 for both the 2008 released version and the
> snapshot. It would be nice to have a snapshot with a different version. Is
> this possible?

The version string comes from the source code, which I didn't change.
The fact that other binaries of the same version crash, while this one
doesn't, is because I built this binary and carefully tested it to
make sure it works.  I guess the binaries that crash were linked with
some faulty DLLs and most likely saw much less testing.  But no
source-level differences exist between these binaries.

Why do you care about the version, anyway?  I'm reluctant to change
the version string without any source-level changes in the code.

[Mark Messer-2]

Eli,

 

My mistake. I now see the latest versions at http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/ are 4.13 and 4.13a. Both were released in 2008.

 

At http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/texinfo/texinfo/makeinfo/, the most recent source files for makeinfo.c and makeinfo.h are 10 months old. I had incorrectly presumed these were the basis for your 4.13a build dated January, 2012.

 

Thank you for your help. We appreciate your careful building and testing. Octave can use the makeinfo.exe you built.

 

Mark

 

On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 10:44 AM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@...> wrote:

> Date: Wed, 29 Feb 2012 09:24:26 -0800
> From: Mark Messer <mmesser314@...>
> Cc: Philip Nienhuis <prnienhuis@...>, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso <jordigh@...>,
>       Tatsuro MATSUOKA <tmacchant@...>, Nitzan Arazi <nitnit@...>,
>       "a.dawid" <alexandre.dawid@...>, octave-bug-tracker@...

>
>
> At the GNU Octave project, there is an intermittent bug that only affects
> Windows installations. 'help foo' is supposed to display information about
> the foo command. It does, but the text is garbled on some computers. See
> https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?35187
>
> The problem was traced to the most recent release of makeinfo.exe, which is
> 4.13 from 2008. The most recent snapshot of makeinfo.exe fixes the problem.

I believe by "the most recent snapshot" you mean the precompiled
binary from this site:

 http://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports/files/texinfo-4.13a-w32-bin.zip/download

If so, then this is not a development snapshot, it is more or less
straightforward MinGW build of stock Texinfo 4.13a distributed by the
upstream Texinfo maintainers.  (In fact, the C implementation of
makeinfo is no longer developed, and instead a new implementation in
Perl is being developed as we speak.)

> The Octave project would like to include that latest snapshot of
> makeinfo.exe in their next release.

Feel free to use the precompiled binary from the above site.

> makeinfo --version reports 4.13 for both the 2008 released version and the
> snapshot. It would be nice to have a snapshot with a different version. Is
> this possible?

The version string comes from the source code, which I didn't change.
The fact that other binaries of the same version crash, while this one
doesn't, is because I built this binary and carefully tested it to
make sure it works.  I guess the binaries that crash were linked with
some faulty DLLs and most likely saw much less testing.  But no
source-level differences exist between these binaries.

Why do you care about the version, anyway?  I'm reluctant to change
the version string without any source-level changes in the code.