[tex-live] TeX Live 2006 binaries attempt

[Jonathan Kew]

On 6 Dec 2006, at 9:34 pm, Karl Berry wrote:

>> make fails in
>> utils/texinfo/info:
>
>     I see similar failures with texinfo on Ubuntu 6.06 (Intel x86).
>
> I can't debug it because it doesn't fail for me on any system I have
> access to.  It obviously has to do with what
> termcap/terminfo/curses/etc. libraries are installed on the system.

On Ubuntu 6.06, installing the libncurses5-dev package solves the  
problem for me.

The issue is that no ncurses headers are installed by default (nor  
any other terminal library), so configure can't find one to use; it  
prints "WARNING: probably need a terminal library, one of: ...", but  
continues, and we then get link errors in the build.

> Texinfo has minimal needs as far as the actual code goes; I expect the
> problem is in the configure madness which tries to figure out which
> library to use.

The "configure madness" isn't really broken; it makes a valiant  
attempt to find a usable library, and warns if it can't (see above).  
I guess it doesn't stop with an immediate error message on the  
grounds that there may be systems where a term lib isn't needed (in  
particular, dgjpp, according to the comments).

The TL source tree includes libs/ncurses, so one possibility would be  
to use our own copy of that, instead of letting configure find an  
installed term library. But that would be a pretty radical change to  
make at this stage.

It's not clear to me how we can easily modify the texinfo  
configuration so that it falls back to TL's private copy of lib/ 
ncurses only in the case where no installed term lib is found;  
because it is set up to try a whole list of different possibilities,  
it's not as simple as other libraries where we have the option to use  
a system version or our own.

Martin, does installing libncurses5-dev (or equivalent for your  
distro) solve the issue on your system?

JK