Re: texinfo problem

["Tim Van Holder" <tim dot van dot holder at pandora dot be>]

> > If AM_MISSING_PROG actually checks
> > for the program in question before using 'missing --run $program', there
> > would be no such problem.
>
> The point is to avoid having to test for the program at configure
> time, since only developers are going to need it and, for them, the
> overhead of a PATH search done by the shell at `missing' execution
> time is probably no big deal, whereas looking for a number of
> auxiliary tools that are not going to be used for random installations
> takes a significant amount of time on slow platforms.

Right. Forget I even mentioned it :-)
One problem would be that while autoconf is well equipped to do a
path search that works on ALL platforms (including those with a
non-colon pathsep, and those where test -f won't necessarily find
a program).  Duplicating such things in missing would seem excessive.

Then again, you could simply mention this problem with missing in
the docs and tell developers to configure using MAKEINFO=makeinfo
if they intend to change the docs; that way, missing wouldn't be run
and the problem wouldn't occur.  Since we're dealing with developers,
not users, some intelligence and manual-reading can be assumed, can't
it? :-)