On Mon, Oct 05, 2026 at 11:31:21PM +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> The mingw ucrt clang on MSYS2 platforms in the github CI do not have a
> shared libperl, therefore do not have XS nor ctexi2any nor Perl SWIG.
> Some C is still compiled, but not used/installed.  This still tests
> native Perl, and all the tests that are not skipped pass, which is nice
> (I would have preferred to skip less tests in tta/perl/t/*.t, see the
> other thread).

Is this a regression?  In other words, should we expect Texinfo to build
on this platform and for the tests to pass?

It reminds me of the broken "Cygwin/MinGW" platform which I believe was
also on the Github CI.  I found some old emails about it.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2024-09/msg00014.html
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2024-10/msg00175.html
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2024-10/msg00180.html

Eli wrote (Sun, 04 Oct 2026 12:42:07 +0300):
> Cygwin _is_ different: it emulates a Posix environment, so Texinfo
> built with Cygwin tools is supposed to behave like it does on Unix.
> That is, any CR characters, if not removed by application code, might
> cause trouble if the application is not ready to deal with CRLF EOLs.
> 
> MSYS2 behaves like Cygwin (it's a fork of Cygwin), but that is not
> very interesting because MSYS2 programs aren't supposed to be used for
> production, only for building Windows programs.  So what an MSYS2
> build of texi2any does is IMO not very important because we aren't
> supposed to meet such a creature in the wild.

So I recommend checking exactly what this platform is before spending any
more time on it and whether it is a valid platform to be supporting.  Is
it a MSYS2 build of texi2any (as Eli describes) or a MinGW build, for
example?

We used not to depend on libperl - this is one of several issues from the
last six months or so which I have planned to revisit.  It was only
required for embedding a Perl interpreter, which wasn't necessary for texi2any
in any of the previously released versions of Texinfo.  libperl was not
installed on Debian-derived distributions, for example.


> The mingw ucrt gcc on MSYS2 platform in the github CI has full XS/C,
> that builds fine and the tta/perl/t/*.t tests pass with XS/C too.
> 
> Many tests in tta/tests do not pass, however:
> 
> 1) there is a test with -o /dev/null and --split-size 1, to make sure that
>    the resuting Info file is non-split.  /dev/null is substituted by the
>    platform null device in the main program (in tests), and if the output
>    file name is the platform null device non-split is supposed to be
>    chosen in conversion to Info.  The test fails both for Perl with XS
>    and ctexi2any, the Info file remains split.
>    It is unexpected since the null device is supposed to be the same
>    in the main program code and in the conversion to Info code.
>    Also, strangely, in C, the "NUL" string is used, but "nul" appears in the
>    error message, although I see nothing in the code that would lowercase
>    the name.

There were also problems with the name of the null device on MinGW/Cygwin.
For the second link above:

> From: Patrice Dumas
> Subject:      Re: Texinfo 7.1.90 on mingw
> Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2024 23:35:10 +0200
> Those errors are expected.  The one about /dev/null happens because the
> Perl and executable are native, while the shell is cygwin and not a
> "native" shell such as the mingw shell that would map /dev/null to the
> native NUL.  There are similar errors with path separators that are not
> mapped.  There is an unknown error that cannot really be understood from
> the error log.  The other are related to file name encoding.  My wild
> guess is that the locale of the cygwin shell is not the same as the
> locale of the native executables and Perl.

Am I wrong in suspecting there may be the same problems with this
MSYS2/MinGW setup as there were with the Cygwin/MinGW setup?




> 2) the translation of document strings fail both for Perl+XS and
>    ctexi2any.  (They succeed in the tta/perl/t/*.t tests.)
> 
> 3) some tests with ctexi2any crash, but there is no message/dump I can
>    see/use.
> 
> Unless I have an access to this platform I do not intend to fix those
> issues, as they are only possible or much easier to investigate with
> direct access.
> 
> -- 
> Pat
> 

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