INSTALL file for texinfo.

     Copyright 1992-2024 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

     Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
     are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
     notice and this notice are preserved.

For generic installation instructions on compiling and installing this
Automake-based distribution, please read the file `INSTALL.generic'.

Installation notes specific to Texinfo:

* texinfo.tex and the other *.tex files are not installed by
  `make install', because TeX installations vary so widely.
  Installing them in the wrong place would give a false sense of
  security.   Instead, you have to run an additional make command
  after the normal make install:

    make TEXMF=/your/texmf install-tex

  where TEXMF is a root of a TeX hierachy that follows the TeX
  Directory Structure standard (http://tug.org/tds/).
  texinfo.tex is installed in ${TEXMF}/tex/texinfo, epsf.tex
  in ${TEXMF}/tex/generic/epsf/, etc.

  (Alternatively, you can simply cp *.tex to the appropriate places.)

  For information on how or where to install files, see your TeX
  documentation in general (i.e. web2c and kpathsea manuals), and the
  texmf.cnf file.

  It is possible to put these .tex files in a `local' place instead of
  overwriting existing ones.  You might find where this is by running
  `kpsewhich -var-value TEXMFLOCAL'.

  If you add files to your TeX installations, not just replace existing
  ones, you very likely will also have to update your ls-R file; do this
  by running the mktexlsr command.

  An alternative is to copy texinfo.tex to the same directory as your
  Texinfo manual, but this is not especially recommended.

  You can get the latest texinfo.tex from
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/texinfo.tex (and all GNU mirrors)
  ftp://tug.org/tex/texinfo.tex (and all CTAN mirrors)
  or from the gnulib project on Savannah (among other places).
  If you have problems with the texinfo.tex in this distribution, please
  check for a newer version.

* If you're maintaining a TeX distribution and keeping the files up to
  date yourself, you may not want to see the installation warnings.

  For that, run configure --disable-install-warnings, or set
  enable_install_warnings=no in the environment.

* The `texi2any' (makeinfo) program is a Perl program that can use
  extension modules, known as XS modules.  The configure script will
  attempt to detect whether such modules can be built and loaded on your
  installation.  If you want to disable the use of XS modules, you can
  give the --disable-perl-xs flag to `configure'; likewise, to use them
  without checking, give the --enable-perl-xs flag.

  When `configure' is running in the XS subdirectory, instead of the
  standard CC, CFLAGS, LDFLAGS etc., it uses special variables with a
  PERL_EXT_ prefix.  These are all listed in the output of `configure
  --help'.  This is necessary because it is possible that the C compiler
  being used to compile Perl extension modules is a different compiler
  to that used for the rest of the package.  (However, if you need to
  override these variables when running `make', use the unprefixed
  variants, e.g. CFLAGS instead of PERL_EXT_CFLAGS.  Exception: you
  cannot override CPPFLAGS this way as gnulib uses this variable.)

      After building the program, the use of XS modules can be
  controlled with the `TEXINFO_XS' environment variable, which may be
  useful for troubleshooting.  Set TEXINFO_XS=debug to print some
  information as the modules are looked for and loaded, TEXINFO_XS=omit
  to disable their use, and TEXINFO_XS=required to force their use.

  Specific focused XS modules are only controlled by TEXINFO_XS.
  XS modules replacing perl code for the main processing steps can be
  controlled more finely.  Three steps are distinguished: the parsing
  step, the structure step for the determination of sectioning and node
  structures, and the conversion step.  If the XS modules are not used
  for a step, they cannot be used for the following steps.
      If you want to use the XS modules but not the XS parser, you can
  set the `TEXINFO_XS_PARSER' environment variable to 0.  If you use
  the XS parser but do not want to use XS for the structure step, you
  can set the `TEXINFO_XS_STRUCTURE' environment variable to 0.  For now,
  the XS modules used for conversion are considered to be experimental,
  so they are not used in the default case, even if the XS modules are used
  for the structure step.  If you want to use the XS modules for conversion,
  you should set the `TEXINFO_XS_CONVERT' environment variable to 1.

* The XS modules get translations for strings to be put in output files
  using libc gettext, using the LANGUAGE variable.  If the gettext
  implementation (such as that on musl) does not support this variable,
  this will not work and strings will not be translated.  However, if you
  pass the --enable-xs-perl-libintl flag to `configure', an alternative
  translation method is activated where XS code calls back into the Perl
  interpreter to get translations, which does work.

* For instructions on compiling this distribution with DJGPP tools
  for MS-DOS and MS-Windows, see the file djgpp/README.

* The Info tree uses a file `dir' as its root node; the `dir-example'
  file in this distribution is included as a possible starting point.
  Use it, modify it, or ignore it just as you like.

* You can create a file texinfo.cnf to be read by TeX when
  processing Texinfo manuals.  For example, you might like to use
  @afourpaper by default.  See the `Preparing for TeX' node in
  the Texinfo manual for more details.  You don't have to create the
  file if you have nothing to put in it.
