yet another Makefile issue

[Stephen Weeks]

> So, just wondering if anyone remembers why building a dummy dir file was
> necessary.  And, if it doesn't seem to cause any other issues, I'll remove
> that command.

I found this old mail

> From: Henry Cejtin <henry@research.nj.nec.com>
> To: sweeks@research.nj.nec.com
> Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 19:20:12 -0500
> 
> Ok, here is a fix that works on Metis.  (The reason that it was different for
> you than me is that you have /sbin in your path (a mistake I would  say)  and
> that  is where install-info was hiding, so for you it found it.)  The reason,
> given that it found install-info, that it didn't work is that it  seems  that
> this  version  of  install-info  is  NOT satisfied with an empty .../info/dir
> file.  When I say not satisfied, I mean that it prints out that it is  happy,
> but  exits  with  a  non-zero status.  The trick is to create the initial dir
> file with a single line consisting of the control-_ character (which info and
> rmail  use  to separate thing).  Thus, in the Makefile in src/runtime, in the
> gmp commands, change the line
> 
> 			cp /dev/null gmp-stuff/info/dir &&		    \
> 
> to
> 
> 			echo 'a' | tr 'a' '\037' >gmp-stuff/info/dir &&	    \
> 
> Mind  you,  you  should give it a try on all the machines again, just to make
> sure.