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Date:	Sat, 02 Mar 2002 21:05:46 +0000
From:	Richard Dawe <rich AT phekda DOT freeserve DOT co DOT uk>
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To:	djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com
Subject:	Re: Dircategories and (tex|txi|texi|texinfo]) files
References:	<5 DOT 1 DOT 0 DOT 14 DOT 2 DOT 20020224202214 DOT 00ab8e50 AT mail DOT dorsai DOT org>
Reply-To:	djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com

Hello.

"Peter J. Farley III" wrote:
[snip]
> 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:
> 
> 1.      DJGPP package maintainers (and/or volunteers like me) attack the
> root of the problem, and update GNU package texinfo files to use both
> the "@dircategory" and "@direntry" commands instead of specifying the
> "START-INFO-DIR-ENTRY" directly.  And submit these patches to the
> appropriate GNU buglists, of course.

I think this should be done, irrespective of what we do for DJGPP.
 
> 2.      Patch the DJGPP-released source files to at least specify the same
> "@dircategory" or "INFO-DIR-SECTION" name as is already used in the
> hand-crafted DJGPP "info/dir" file.  These would *not* be submitted to
> the GNU maintainers, and would add a continuing extra burden on DJGPP
> package porters/maintainers.

Hmmm, I don't like the sound of "continuing burden", especially when we can
put this in the DSM file's install-info line.
 
> 3.      Update zippo to look at the texinfo files it is going to run an
> install-info on and programmatically replace all "START-INFO-DIR-ENTRY"
> lines (or at least the ones it "knows" about via some database of known
> packages) with the appropriate "@dircategory" and "@direntry"
> lines.  This is tricky, but should be possible, at least for the "root"
> info files that are installed by zippo.  "@include" files would
> obviously be more difficult to process, and would not be processed in
> an initial release.

I don't like this at all. This code should not be part of the zippo executable
itself, but some helper script that spawns sed/awk/m4/whatever.

But I think this idea was discarded later in the thread, when install-info's
--section option was pointed out.
 
> 4.      Change zippo DSM files *not* to use "install-info" for packages
> already carefully hand-inserted into the DJGPP "info/dir" file.  Run
> "install-info" *only* for those packages that already use
> "@dircategory" commands, and update the hand-crafted DJGPP "info/dir"
> file to match them.

Currently zippo runs install-info automatically. This was put in, because
zippo doesn't run external or built-in commands automatically on
install/uninstall yet. When you do an install, zippo will search for info
files being installed in info/ and run install-info on them. When you do an
uninstall, zippo was also run install-info to remove directory entries.

So any changes to DSMs to place info directory entries in different sections
are dependent on:

* zippo not running install-info automatically;
* zippo running the *-install-script and *-uninstall-script commands, to allow
install-info to be run.

I'll add this to my list of things to do for zippo. Right now this isn't at
the top, since I'm working on getting automatic HTTP/FTP downloads with wget,
which is more important right now IMHO.

[snip]
> Vis-a-vis alternative #4, I compiled a list from the packages that I
> have downloaded of which ones use "@dircategory", and if so what name
> they use.  Below is that list, and hopefully it won't wrap too badly:
> 
> Name        texinfo filename    dirent  dircat  Section name used
> ---------   ------------------  ------  ------  ---------------------
[snip]
> perl        (None)                              *Note 3

Is there a POD to info convertor? It's much nicer to use info than man inside
Emacs.

[snip]
> which       which.texinfo       N         N     *Note 2

FWIW I posted to some patches to djgpp-workers a while back to fix which.
Andrew Cottrell is the maintainer for which for DJGPP. I don't know whether
the patches were propagated into the which mainline sources or not (I hope
so!).

> *Note 1 -- Main texinfo file has direntry/category, others do not.
> *Note 2 -- No START-INFO-DIR-ENTRY either.
> *Note 3 -- Uses POD format for docs.

Thanks, bye, Rich =]

-- 
Richard Dawe [ http://www.phekda.freeserve.co.uk/richdawe/ ]

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