README
1$Id$
2This is the README file for the GNU Texinfo distribution. Texinfo is
3the preferred documentation format for GNU software.
4
5 Copyright (C) 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000,
6 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
7
8 Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
9 are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
10 notice and this notice are preserved.
11
12See ./INSTALL* for installation instructions.
13
14Primary distribution point: ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/
15 (list of mirrors at: http://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html)
16
17Home page: http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/
18 (list of mirrors at: http://www.gnu.org/server/list-mirrors.html)
19 This page includes links to other Texinfo-related programs.
20
21Mailing lists and archives:
22- bug-texinfo@gnu.org for bug reports or enhancement suggestions,
23 archive: http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/bug-texinfo
24- help-texinfo@gnu.org for authoring questions and general discussion,
25 archive: http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/help-texinfo
26- texinfo-pretest@texinfo.org for pretests of new releases,
27 archive: http://texinfo.org/ftp/texinfo-pretest-archive
28There are no corresponding newsgroups.
29
30Bug reports:
31 please include enough information for the maintainers to reproduce the
32 problem. Generally speaking, that means:
33- the contents of any input files necessary to reproduce the bug (crucial!).
34- a description of the problem and any samples of the erroneous output.
35- the version number of Texinfo and the program(s) involved (use --version).
36- hardware, operating system, and compiler versions (uname -a).
37- unusual options you gave to configure, if any (see config.status).
38- anything else that you think would be helpful.
39
40Patches are most welcome; if possible, please make them with diff -c and
41include ChangeLog entries.
42
43When sending email, please do not encode or split the messages in any
44way if at all possible; it's easier to deal with one large message than
45many small ones. GNU shar (http://www.gnu.org/software/sharutils/) is a
46convenient way of packaging multiple and/or binary files for email.
47
48See README.dev for information on the Texinfo development environment --
49any interested parties are welcome. If you're a programmer and wish to
50contribute, this should get you started. And if you're not a
51programmer, you can still make significant contributions by writing test
52cases, checking the documentation against the implementation, etc.
53
54This distribution includes the following files, among others:
55 README This file.
56 README.dev Texinfo developer information.
57
58 INSTALL Texinfo-specific installation notes.
59 NEWS Summary of new features by release.
60 INTRODUCTION Brief introduction to the system, and
61 how to create readable files from the
62 Texinfo source files in this distribution.
63
64Texinfo documentation files (in ./doc):
65 texinfo.txi Describes the Texinfo language and many
66 of the associated tools. It tells how
67 to use Texinfo to write documentation,
68 how to use Texinfo mode in GNU Emacs,
69 TeX, makeinfo, and the Emacs Lisp
70 Texinfo formatting commands.
71
72 info.texi This manual tells you how to use
73 Info. This document also comes as part of
74 GNU Emacs. If you do not have Emacs,
75 you can format this Texinfo source
76 file with makeinfo or TeX and then
77 read the resulting Info file with the
78 standalone Info reader that is part of
79 this distribution.
80
81 info-stnd.texi This manual tells you how to use
82 the standalone GNU Info reader that is
83 included in this distribution as C
84 source (./info).
85
86Printing related files:
87 doc/texinfo.tex This TeX definitions file tells
88 the TeX program how to typeset a
89 Texinfo file into a DVI file ready for
90 printing.
91
92 util/texindex.c This file contains the source for
93 the `texindex' program that generates
94 sorted indices used by TeX when
95 typesetting a file for printing.
96
97 util/texi2dvi This is a shell script for
98 producing an indexed DVI file using
99 TeX and texindex.
100
101Source files for standalone C programs:
102 ./lib
103 ./makeinfo
104 ./info
105
106Installation files:
107 Makefile.am What Automake uses to make a Makefile.in.
108 Makefile.in What `configure' uses to make a Makefile,
109 created by Automake.
110 configure.ac What Autoconf uses to create `configure'.
111 configure Configuration script for local conditions,
112 created by Autoconf.
113
README-alpha
1$Id$
2This is the README-alpha file for GNU Texinfo.
3
4 Copyright (C) 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000,
5 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
6
7 Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
8 are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
9 notice and this notice are preserved.
10
11This is a test release!
12
13The latest test release (if any) is available at
14ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/
15http://texinfo.org/ftp/pretests/texinfo.tar.gz
16
17Please do NOT send reports about this release to any GNU mailing list or
18newsgroup. Instead, email comments and problem reports to
19texinfo-pretest@texinfo.org. You are welcome to join that mailing list;
20to do so, please visit http://ff0.org/mailman/admin/texinfo-pretest.
21It's archived at http://ff0.org/pipermail/texinfo-pretest.
22
23If you see a problem in this release that you've already reported, feel
24free to re-report it -- it's good to get a reminder. If you sent a
25patch for a previous release, and you haven't received any feedback
26about it, please do re-send it, it likely got lost.
27
28For development environment information, see README.dev.
29
README.dev
1$Id$
2This README.dev file describes the development environment.
3
4 Copyright (C) 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008
5 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
6
7 Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
8 are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
9 notice and this notice are preserved.
10
11The development sources for GNU Texinfo are available through anonymous
12CVS at Savannah:
13 http://savannah.gnu.org/cvs/?group=texinfo
14
15This distribution uses whatever versions of Automake, Autoconf, and
16Gettext are listed in NEWS; usually the latest ones released. If you
17are getting the sources from CVS (or change configure.ac), you'll need
18to have these tools installed to (re)build. You'll also need help2man.
19All of these programs are available from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu.
20
21After getting the CVS sources, and installing the tools above, you can run
22 ./autogen.sh
23and then
24 ./configure CFLAGS='-g -Wdeclaration-after-statement'
25and then
26 make
27
28After the initial autogen && configure, simply running make should suffice.
29
30The reason for that particular -W is that intermixing declarations with
31statementts is an easy thing to do accidentally, gcc won't warn about it
32by default, and other compilers that don't support it are still
33widespread. Lots of other -W options can be useful too, and patches are
34welcome to resolve the diagnostics. Or if you're not using gcc, of
35course you shouldn't include it at all.
36
37This distribution also uses Gnulib (http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib)
38to share common files, with the files being checked in to CVS. If you
39get automake/conf/etc. errors from ./autogen.sh, please try doing a CVS
40checkout of gnulib (in a separate directory to the texinfo checkout),
41and then run
42 ../gnulib/gnulib-tool --update
43in your top-level Texinfo directory. (gnulib-tool is in the gnulib CVS tree.)
44
45For the record, a first time invocation would be
46 gnulib-tool --import --m4-base=gnulib/m4 --source-base=gnulib/lib \
47 --no-vc-files getopt
48
49Many more modules have been added since. The currently-used gnulib
50modules and other gnulib information are recorded in
51gnulib/m4/gnulib-cache.m4. Given a source checkout of gnulib, you can
52update the files with gnulib-tool --import.
53