Re: texinfo-7.2.92 pretest available

> Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2026 15:50:19 +0200
> From: Eli Zaretskii <[email protected]>
> Cc: [email protected]
> 
> > From: Gavin Smith <[email protected]>
> > Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2026 20:41:01 +0000
> > Cc: [email protected]
> > 
> > The next pretest distribution for the next Texinfo release has been
> > uploaded to
> > 
> > https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/texinfo-7.2.92.tar.xz
> > 
> > Many thanks to all those who have tested earlier pretests and reported
> > the results.  There have not been many changes since the previous pretest,
> > and we hope to release this as Texinfo 7.3 in a few days' time.
> > 
> > We make these pretests to help find any problems before we make an
> > official release to a larger audience, so that the release will be
> > as good as it can be.
> > 
> > Please send any feedback to <[email protected]>.  This could include
> > problems building on particular platforms, or feedback on how new features
> > work.
> 
> I've built this with MinGW on MS-Windows.  It builds (almost) cleanly
> and passes all the tests.

Since Patrice asked me some time ago to try with --enable-using-c-texi2any,
I've now tried that as well.  The build is as clean as without this
option, but all the tta/tests that are not skipped fail.  Same with
tta/tests/many_input_files.

The reason seems to be that ctexi2any segfaults whenever it is
invoked.  Here's a random example from a log file:

  doing test split_nocopying_split_dev_null, src_file ./formatting/split_nocopying.texi
  format_option:
  C/ctexi2any split_nocopying_split_dev_null -> formatting/out_parser/split_nocopying_split_dev_null
   ./..//C/ctexi2any  --force --conf-dir ./../perl/t/init/ --conf-dir ./../perl/init --conf-dir ./../perl/ext -I ./formatting -I formatting/ -I ./ -I . -I built_input -I built_input/non_ascii --error-limit=1000 -c TEST=1  --output formatting/out_parser/split_nocopying_split_dev_null/ --info --split-size 1 -o /dev/null ./formatting/split_nocopying.texi > formatting/out_parser/split_nocopying_split_dev_null/split_nocopying.1 2>formatting/out_parser/split_nocopying_split_dev_null/split_nocopying.2
  failed with status 5

"Status 5" means it crashed with the Windows equivalent of SIGSEGV.

It also crashes if I invoke the above command manually.  I thought I'd
try to debug this, but ctexi2any is stripped of debug symbols.  Could
you tell me how to prevent symbols from being stripped? which Makefile
to change and where?

I also tried "make install" in this configuration.  That revealed the
following problems:

   . it installs bin/texi2any.exe, but the dependency DLLs are not in
     the same directory, they are in lib/texi2any/bin, so the program
     cannot run
   . after copying the DLLs into the same directory as the .exe,
     running texi2any.exe shows the error message:

      Can't open perl script "d:/usr/share/texi2any/load_txi_modules": No such file or directory
      texi2any (C): bug: call_init_perl status: 2

     "d:/usr/" is the value of $prefix.  This means the installation
     is not relocatable: it looks for load_txi_modules by absolute
     file name, not relative to its installation directory.  This will
     be fixed when installing the package in its actual place under
     $prefix, but it would be nice to be able to move the whole
     installation tree without breaking the package

   . it also installs makeinfo.exe, but that seems to be the libtool
     wrapper, not the actual executable (which is supposed to be an
     identical copy of texi2any.exe)