On Sun, Jan 18, 2026 at 08:15:58AM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> Oh. Then it means the installation is not "relocatable", i.e. the
> absolute file names written in the *.la files must be the places where
> the libraries are installed. Or is there some environment variable
> that can be set to override that? To be "relocatable", file names
> should be relative to some common root, so that the entire
> installation tree could be moved to a different location, and the
> programs will still work. This is especially important on Windows,
> where many people don't build packages for their systems, but instead
> download prebuilt binaries and install them according to their local
> arrangements of the directory tree. Previous Texinfo releases didn't
> impose such restrictions, AFAIR. Of course, in practice this didn't
> really matter, because the binary distributions of Texinfo I upload to
> my ezwinports site don't include the DLL files, since those are
> specific to my version of Perl. And the Perl files in $prefix/lib and
> in $prefix/share/texinfo are not loaded using absolute file names, are
> they?
The Perl modules are searched for first using absolute file names, or,
more precisely, what configure provided as datadir and libdir. If the
Texinfo/Parser.pm file is not found there in the expected subdirectory,
then relative paths from
command_directory/../
are tried, where command_directory is the directory the texi2any command
executed is in. So, I think that the installation is "relocatable".
Regarding the .la files, they are found in the @INC, in front of which
the directory where the .la files (and the Perl modules) can be found
has been put. As Gavin said, we add a directory where the .la is
as a directory to search for dlopened object by DynaLoader and give the
.la dlname as dlopened object name, the DLL should also be found
correctly, either below configure $libdir or below
command_directory/../lib/.
> > > So Texinfo::XSLoader accesses the *.la files?
> >
> > Yes.
>
> Maybe this should be documented on some README or in the
> Texinfo/texi2any manual, including the logic used by Texinfo::XSLoader
> to find the libraries? I couldn't find it in the manuals, maybe I
> missed something. This information might be valuable for people who
> distribute the binaries and for people who install them.
Gavin, any comment about that?
--
Pat
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