Re: makeinfo 4.7

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org> writes:

>>> Just like we prefer that users upgrade to the latest version of emacs
>>> (to avoid spending time on bug reports for older versions), I'm sure
>>> the maintainers of makeinfo also prefer people to use the latest
>>> version.
>>>
>>> So why should emacs (of all projects) not use an up-to-date version of
>>> makeinfo?  I don't see the problem at all.
>
> Just today these new Texinfo directives caused trouble for me.  I
> successfully compiled CVS Emacs on quite an old GNU/Linux server
> (Red Hat 9.0).

Why would you not upgrade the server?  It has reached end of service
long ago.  There are not even security updates anymore.

At the current point of time, I get password crack attacks via ssh
about twice a week on my dialup account (so randomly assigned IP
numbers), usually several hundred login attempts about a second apart.

One of the infected machines was on a university network, and the
system administrators there were kind enough to tell me what computer
it was.  It was an embedded system running an old version of RedHat.

I really don't think that we should go out of our depth to support
installations like that.

> Due to these errors I was unable to consult the Info documentation
> from the rest of Info files that should be created after the
> compilation that was interrupted by makeinfo errors.  And I had no
> time/need to update Texinfo on this server.

You had the time to check out, configure and install Emacs from CVS,
but did not have the time to run

yum update texinfo

(or fetch and install a suitable RPM from one of many repositories).

Unhn.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum