bug#81332: info/dir and INFO_NONMISC are not gated by DOCLANGS

> THose 3 manuals must always be built and always be installed,
> regardless of DOCLANGS.

Understood, and then the situation is worse than what I described: with DOCLANGS that does not contain default, those three manuals are not built at all on master right now. info/dir and INFO_NONMISC listing them is the correct part; the build is the broken part.

That is a regression from my second patch. Before it, every doc directory ran one sub-make per language, and doc/emacs, doc/lispintro and doc/lispref have no DOCLANG in their Makefiles, so each of those sub-makes just rebuilt the default manual. That is what caused the duplicate copies under make -j. My fix made the language list per directory, and with default filtered out those directories ended up with nothing to build.

So the fix goes the other way round: doc/emacs, doc/lispintro and doc/lispref always build the default language, whatever DOCLANGS says, while doc/misc keeps honoring it. Then info/dir and INFO_NONMISC stay exactly as they are, no gating anywhere.

That also drops the build-aux question: info/dir always has those three entries, so make-info-dir never gets fewer than two arguments, and I do not need to touch it.

One question before I write the patch: should doc/misc keep honoring DOCLANGS? With DOCLANGS='fr' it currently builds only ses-fr, and the English misc manuals are skipped. I plan to leave that as is, since those manuals are not referenced from doc strings, but say the word if you want default forced everywhere.

Vincent: this also means empty DOCLANGS will no longer disable all manuals, the three above will still be built. Given Eli's requirement I do not think we can keep that property.

I will send the patch once the doc/misc question is settled.

Cheers,
[email protected]

On Tuesday, 28 July 2026 at 18:34, Eli Zaretskii <[email protected]> wrote:

> > Date: Tue, 28 Jul 2026 15:23:40 +0000
> > From: Boris <[email protected]>
> > Cc: Eli Zaretskii <[email protected]>, Vincent Belaiche <[email protected]>
> >
> > The bug is closed and this is not a regression from the patches, so this is just a question: is the remaining DOCLANGS inconsistency worth fixing? I mentioned it when Vincent and I discussed the empty DOCLANGS case, and I said I could take it as a follow-up.
> >
> > Two places still hardcode the three built-in manuals:
> >
> > - srcdir_doc_info_dir_inputs lists doc/emacs/emacs.texi, doc/lispintro/emacs-lisp-intro.texi and doc/lispref/elisp.texi unconditionally, while the misc entries are gated (texi_misc_default only exists when default is in DOCLANGS)
> > - INFO_NONMISC lists the same three .info files for install-info
> >
> > The visible effect is with DOCLANGS='fr' (or any set without default): emacs-info, lispintro-info and lispref-info are no-ops, so those manuals are never built, but info/dir still lists them, and install-info still runs install-info on them. The latter is invisible today only because the recipe ignores errors.
> 
> THose 3 manuals must always be built and always be installed,
> regardless of DOCLANGS.  The first two are referenced from various doc
> strings, and the 3rd one (Lisp Intro) is important enough part of
> Emacs to be available regardless of the language preferences of the
> user who builds the manuals.
> 
> > Gating both on $(filter default,$(DOCLANGS)) is a small change. One detail: build-aux/make-info-dir starts with "test $# -ge 2 || exit 1", so with empty DOCLANGS everything would be gated away and "make info" would fail instead of generating a dir file. I would relax that to -ge 1, so info/dir is still generated with the header and no entries.
> 
> Can we do that without involving build-aux/ files?  Those files are
> from Gnulib, so I'd prefer our local tricks to be just ours.
> 
> Thanks.
>