[R-sig-Fedora] WARNING you cannot build info or html versions of the R manuals

[Tom Callaway]

On 01/16/2016 05:24 PM, Rolf Turner wrote:
> All that being said, the question remains as to *why* R cannot find
> "texinfo" when it is indeed present on my system.

Rather than give you a lengthy discussion of how RPM building works and
hacking the R spec, let's focus on this question instead (I'm still
willing to show you RPM building if you'd like, because if you're
sticking with Fedora 17 indefinitely it will be useful to you...)

The warning message string "you cannot build info or HTML versions of
the R manuals" comes from m4/R.m4:

  if test "${r_cv_prog_texi2any_v5}" != yes; then
    warn_info="you cannot build info or HTML versions of the R manuals"
    AC_MSG_WARN([${warn_info}])
    MAKEINFO=""
  else
    MAKEINFO="${MAKEINFO}"
  fi

In that same file, if you look at the beginning of the m4 function, you
see this comment:

  ## Building the R Texinfo manuals requires texinfo v5.1 or later.
  ## Set shell variable r_cv_prog_texi2any_v5 to 'yes' if a recent
  ## enough Makeinfo is found, and to 'no' otherwise.

Fedora 17 has texinfo 4.1, which is several years older than 5.1. You'll
need to upgrade that to silence this error in R.

You might try rebuilding the latest texinfo src RPM. We're at 6.0 in
Fedora 23+:

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=676407

Download the src RPM from that page, then, on your system, try:

  rpmbuild --rebuild texinfo-6.0-2.fc24.src.rpm

That should (hopefully) result in a texinfo RPM built for Fedora 17.
Then you can install the new RPMS (they'll be in ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/$target
where $target is probably x86_64):

  rpm -Uvh info-6.0-2.fc17.*.rpm texinfo-6.0-2.fc17.*.rpm

hth,

~tom

==
Red Hat