$Id: README.dev,v 1.7 2003/11/24 15:11:06 karl Exp $
README.dev - Texinfo developer information.

  Copyright (C) 2002, 2003 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.

The development sources for Texinfo is available through anonymous cvs
at Savannah, see
  http://savannah.gnu.org/cvs/?group=texinfo

This distribution uses whatever versions of automake, autoconf, and
gettext are listed in NEWS; usually the latest ones released.  If you
are getting the Texinfo sources from cvs, or change the Texinfo
configure.ac, you'll need to have these tools installed to (re)build.
You'll also need help2man.  (All of these are available from
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu.)

Here's the order in which to run the tools for a fresh build:

  autoheader    # creates config.in, not necessarily needed every time
  aclocal -I m4 # for a new version of automake
  automake
  autoconf
  configure CFLAGS=-g --enable-maintainer-mode
  make

(with arguments to taste, of course.)  Or you can run

  ./bootstrap

instead of the various auto* tools.


One final note: If you would like to contribute to the GNU project by
implementing additional documentation output formats for Texinfo, that
would be great.  But please do not write a separate translator texi2foo
for your favorite format foo!  That is the hard way to do the job, and
makes extra work in subsequent maintenance, since the Texinfo language
is continually being enhanced and updated.  Instead, the best approach
is modify Makeinfo to generate the new format, as it does now for Info,
HTML, XML, and DocBook.
