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

[Rolf Turner]

Thank you *very* much for this clear and detailed response. I will give 
it a try and report on what happens later today.

Thanks again.

cheers,

Rolf

-- 
Technical Editor ANZJS
Department of Statistics
University of Auckland
Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276

On 19/01/16 03:52, Tom Callaway wrote:
> 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