R SIG Fedora - Jan 2016 - WARNING you cannot build info or html versions of the R manuals

Are you building from a source tarball or using the Fedora SRPM? I strongly
advise you to rebuild the SRPM, because the resulting binary RPM will have all
the necessary deps for building and installing. You might need to change the
spec up a bit, since I assume building on Fedora means a modern system, and
f17.... isn't modern.

On Jan 16, 2016 4:48 PM, Rolf Turner <r.turner at auckland.ac.nz>
wrote:
>
>
> My apologies for an inadvertent cross-posting.? I *intended* to send 
> this message to r-sig-fedora but by mistake sent it to 
> users at lists.fedoraproject.org? . 
> So I am re-sending it to the address that I actually intended. 
>
> Again, I apologise for the screw-up. 
>
> So.? Here we go again: 
>
> It's no big deal, but when I build R from source (as I must) I always 
> get the warning given in the subject line of this post. 
>
> I have searched the web a bit and have found a number of references to 
> this warning.? Universally the proffered solution is "install
texinfo".
>
> So I did (just now) 
>
> ???? sudo yum install texinfo 
>
> and was told: 
>
> > Package texinfo-4.13a-16.fc17.x86_64 already installed and latest
version
> > Nothing to do 
>
> I checked with "whereis texinfo" and got: 
>
> > texinfo: /usr/share/texinfo /usr/share/man/man5/texinfo.5.gz 
>
>
> So it's there on my system --- but perhaps not where R can find it??? 
>
> Can anyone suggest to me what I need to do to get R and texinfo to 
> cooperate? 
>
> Please note that I am running Fedora 17.? Yes, I know, it's 
> antediluvian.? But for reasons I do not wish to discuss, I'm stuck 
> there.? (This is one of the reasons why I must build R from source. 
> It all works fine, except for that warning.) 
>
> cheers, 
>
> Rolf Turner 
>
> -- 
> Technical Editor ANZJS 
> Department of Statistics 
> University of Auckland 
> Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276 
>
> _______________________________________________ 
> R-SIG-Fedora mailing list 
> R-SIG-Fedora at r-project.org 
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-fedora

On 17/01/16 11:03, Tom Callaway wrote:
> Are you building from a source tarball or using the Fedora SRPM? I
> strongly advise you to rebuild the SRPM, because the resulting binary
> RPM will have all the necessary deps for building and installing. You
> might need to change the spec up a bit, since I assume building on
> Fedora means a modern system, and f17.... isn't modern.
Indeed it is not modern!

I build from the source tarball.  I don't know about/have never heard of 
"SRPM".

(a) How *does* one build from the Fedora SRPM?

(b) How does one "change the spec up a bit"?  How does one find the 
"spec" to change it?  Does one need to be a Fedora guru in order to be
able to change the spec without bringing the universe to an end?  (I am 
*not*, sad to say, a Fedora guru.)

(c) All that being said, the question remains as to *why* R cannot find 
"texinfo" when it is indeed present on my system.

I do not wish to run the risk of rendering my system unusable, by making 
changes that are beyond my comprehension, because of the annoying but 
minor (and essentially harmless) warning.  I really just want to 
understand a bit about why the warning eventuates at all, when it 
appears to me that my system has everything that it needs to "build info 
and html versions" of the manuals.

cheers,

Rolf
> On Jan 16, 2016 4:48 PM, Rolf Turner <r.turner at auckland.ac.nz>
wrote:
>>
>>
>> My apologies for an inadvertent cross-posting.  I *intended* to send
>> this message to r-sig-fedora but by mistake sent it to
>> users at lists.fedoraproject.org  .
>> So I am re-sending it to the address that I actually intended.
>>
>> Again, I apologise for the screw-up.
>>
>> So.  Here we go again:
>>
>> It's no big deal, but when I build R from source (as I must) I
always
>> get the warning given in the subject line of this post.
>>
>> I have searched the web a bit and have found a number of references to
>> this warning.  Universally the proffered solution is "install
texinfo".
>>
>> So I did (just now)
>>
>>       sudo yum install texinfo
>>
>> and was told:
>>
>>> Package texinfo-4.13a-16.fc17.x86_64 already installed and latest
version
>>> Nothing to do
>>
>> I checked with "whereis texinfo" and got:
>>
>>> texinfo: /usr/share/texinfo /usr/share/man/man5/texinfo.5.gz
>>
>>
>> So it's there on my system --- but perhaps not where R can find
it???
>>
>> Can anyone suggest to me what I need to do to get R and texinfo to
>> cooperate?
>>
>> Please note that I am running Fedora 17.  Yes, I know, it's
>> antediluvian.  But for reasons I do not wish to discuss, I'm stuck
>> there.  (This is one of the reasons why I must build R from source.
>> It all works fine, except for that warning.)
-- 
Technical Editor ANZJS
Department of Statistics
University of Auckland
Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276

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