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Mail Archives: djgpp-workers/2002/02/25/11:01:52

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Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 17:07:47 +0200 (IST)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
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To: "Peter J. Farley III" <pjfarley AT dorsai DOT org>
cc: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: Dircategories and (tex|txi|texi|texinfo]) files
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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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