[tlbuild] Building xindy for TL2010: two questions

[Vladimir Volovich]

"JS" == Joachim Schrod writes:

 >> (1) In clean environment, xindy-2.4 configure output looks like
 >> this: ...  i.e. there is no TeX programs available. This was fatal
 >> with xindy-2.4pre2 (xindy-new at that time). Is this a problem?
 >> 
 >> I don't think so.  (About building the doc, as I recall?)  Joachim?

 JS> Sorry, but this is a problem: LaTeX is used to create a mapping of
 JS> inputenc charactes to LICR macro codes. E.g., that's how we
 JS> discover that \"a in a raw LaTeX index means ä, or that "\IeC {\ss
 JS> }" is "ß".

 JS> Probably we should simply distribute the generated files as part of
 JS> xindy's source, LaTeX inputenc files don't change any more. That's
 JS> similar to distributing C files that got generated by lex.

imho, for the build inside texlive, or inside distributions such as
debian or redhat, it is not needed, since in case of texlive, we
distribute pre-generated platform-independent xindy runtime files in the
texmf tree, and could easily skip the xindy-rules and docs build
(--disable-xindy-rules --disable-xindy-docs). similarly, in
distributions, xindy build dependencies could easily include the
necessary latex packages. if some "normal user" is building xindy from
source, it is reasonable to expect him to have latex available during
the build, since xindy is going to be used together with latex anyway.

so, in all cases, including pre-generated platform independent files
into the xindy distribution seems unnecessary (and error prone).

Best,
v.