I often have to build GDB from sources because of IoT gadgets and other lesser used platforms. 'make install' often fails because the tools to build the documentation is missing (and its not available in a repo). Emacs and other packages often provide a configuration option to skip the documentation step: emacs-24.5$ ./configure --help | grep -i info -V, --version display version information and exit --infodir=DIR info documentation [DATAROOTDIR/info] --without-makeinfo don't require makeinfo for building manuals don't compress some files (.el, .info, etc.) when Rewinding a bit, Configure is supposed to configure for the platform. Its not clear to me why GDB and Emacs is configuring to build the documentation when the tools are not available. it does not make a lot of sense. I'm guessing one of a few things needs to happen: (1) GDB should not configure to build documentation when the tools are not available - GDB can issue a warning in this case, but things should not fail (2) GDB should provide an option to disable building the documentation One of the folks on the mailing list suggested to set MAKEINFO=/bin/true during configuration. If that's the case, then Configure should do it because that is the tool's job - to configure the build for the platform.
I can confirm that this still is the case with gdb 8.2 (on Debian stable).
(In reply to Dima Pasechnik from comment #1) > I can confirm that this still is the case with gdb 8.2 (on Debian stable). (on a bog-standard x86_64 host, of all things).
Dup. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 14678 ***