Mail Archives: djgpp-workers/2002/02/25/11:01:52
On Sun, 24 Feb 2002, Peter J. Farley III wrote:
> It's been a while, and I'm not sure how much time I can personally
> devote to resolving this, but Rich Dawe suggested I bring this issue to
> the list, so here it is.
Thanks for all the footwork!
> This all results (after a large number of zippo installs) in a DJGPP
> "info/dir" file with almost everything under the "Miscellaneous"
> section, and most of DJGPP's careful work in organizing the "info/dir"
> contents gone to heck in a handbasket. The result is unusable as an
> information resource unless you already know the name of the utility or
> package you want information about. If you type just "info" to *look*
> for the right tool to use (which I find myself doing as often as not),
> the mess you have to look through is very much less than helpful.
>
> Now, I already know that the failure to specify info section names is
> *not* the fault of anyone on *this* list. However, if zippo is going
> to be the installation tool of the future of DJGPP, some decisions need
> to be made, and some work thereafter needs to be done. There are a few
> alternatives AFAICS, not necessarily mutually exclusive:
I would like to suggest yet another alternative, that is almost identical
to your #4. It's a 2-step dance:
1) Don't put install-info commands into the DSM files for packages that
already have entries in the DIR file from the latest released djdev.
2) When you do put install-info commands into the DSM, use the --section
option of install-info to specify the precise section where we want
the entry to be placed. If necessary, use the --entry option as well.
The rationale for this is that we maintain the DIR file manually, and any
new ported packages are normally added to it right away (well, at least
that's the theory ;-). So for most packages, users who install something
do not need to run install-info at all, since it's all have been done
for them already. The only exceptions are the packages ported since the
last djdev release; thus clause 2) above.
Of course (putting on my Texinfo co-maintainer hat), if you spot an Info
manual without @dircategory or @direntry, or with faulty entries, please
report that to the respective package maintainer(s). But whatever they
do to get their act together, we in the DJGPP project will almost
certainly use a different partition in the DIR file, so even the fixed
manuals will not satisfy our specific needs.
> Vis-a-vis alternative #3, there *is* a recommendation in the GNU
> Programming Standards document about how "info/dir" files should be
> structured and sectioned.
These standards don't make much sense for DJGPP users, since they almost
never build the packages themselves. So it doesn't do us any good to
comply to the standard DIR partition, especially since the bulk of the
GNU project has yet to catch up with these standards. As long as there's
a mess out there, we had better fix it manually, like we've been doing
all the time.
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