Building the toolchain may fail due to crashing makeinfo

[Firegate1075]

The build of the kindlehf toolchain may fail during the build of glibc because of an error in makeinfo from package texinfo.
I found, that Ubuntu ships version 7.1 of texinfo. Building and installing makeinfo version 7.2 from source fixes this issue and does not crash.

Host System: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Linux DESKTOP-04C6TNI 5.15.167.4-microsoft-standard-WSL2 #1 SMP Tue Nov 5 00:21:55 UTC 2024 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Tested in WSL Ubuntu and native Kubuntu

[NiLuJe]

An excerpt of the build.log exhibiting the issue might be helpful for future readers ;).

---

AFAIK, makeinfo is not something that crosstool-ng can take care of itself, so there's nothing much we can do about it except document it.

[Frenzie]

I just built the kindlehf TC because I wanted to see the log too, but I can't confirm any issues with makeinfo 7.1.1. I now have a kindlehf toolchain.

$ makeinfo --version
texi2any (GNU texinfo) 7.1.1

Copyright (C) 2024 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

The release notes do mention something about a potential crash.
(texi2any and makeinfo are the same thing)
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2024-09/msg00002.html

• texi2any
  . fix potential crash when @include is used inside a table
  . do not complain about presence of @anchor inside @item in a table
  . C source files that are generated from *.xs files are no no longer
  distributed, so xsubpp from Perl is needed to build XS modules.
  . fix bug that led to memory alignment error on SPARC
  . performance improvement and fixes for MinGW
  . test failures due to floating point rounding error fixed (observed
  on IBM POWER9 processor)

[Firegate1075]

Thank you for your replies
I could reproduce this today on a clean wsl ubuntu installation on a different machine.

I have attatched the log (compressed due to large size) build.log.tar.gz. As you can see in Line 290386, makeinfo/texi2any crashes while installing glibc, after which the install command does not find the output file libc.info and fails the build.

See lines 290383-290390:

[ALL  ]      LANGUAGE=C LC_ALL=C makeinfo -P /home/linus/kindle/koxtoolchain/build/kindlehf/.build/arm-kindlehf-linux-gnueabihf/build/build-libc/multilib/manual/ --output=/home/linus/kindle/koxtoolchain/build/kindlehf/.build/arm-kindlehf-linux-gnueabihf/build/build-libc/multilib/manual/libc.info libc.texinfo
[ALL  ]      texi2any (XS parser): bug: parent hv not already set
[ALL  ]      
[ALL  ]      /home/linus/kindle/koxtoolchain/build/kindlehf/.build/arm-kindlehf-linux-gnueabihf/buildtools/bin/makeinfo: line 2: 308840 Aborted                 (core dumped) /usr/bin/makeinfo --force "${@}"
[ALL  ]      .././scripts/mkinstalldirs /home/linus/x-tools/arm-kindlehf-linux-gnueabihf/arm-kindlehf-linux-gnueabihf/sysroot/usr/share/info
[ALL  ]      mkdir -p -- /home/linus/x-tools/arm-kindlehf-linux-gnueabihf/arm-kindlehf-linux-gnueabihf/sysroot/usr/share/info
[ALL  ]      for file in /home/linus/kindle/koxtoolchain/build/kindlehf/.build/arm-kindlehf-linux-gnueabihf/build/build-libc/multilib/manual/libc.info*; do   /home/linus/kindle/koxtoolchain/build/kindlehf/.build/tools/bin/install -c -m 644 $file /home/linus/x-tools/arm-kindlehf-linux-gnueabihf/arm-kindlehf-linux-gnueabihf/sysroot/usr/share/info/; done
[ALL  ]      /usr/bin/install: cannot stat '/home/linus/kindle/koxtoolchain/build/kindlehf/.build/arm-kindlehf-linux-gnueabihf/build/build-libc/multilib/manual/libc.info*': No such file or directory

This seems to be discussed in this bug report. This seems to be the bug mentioned in the 7.1.1 release @Frenzie mentioned. My wsl ubuntu is still running version 7.1 where the bug was reported.

$ makeinfo --version
texi2any (GNU texinfo) 7.1

Copyright (C) 2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.```