[CC'ing texinfo maintainer]

On 2008-05-05 14:45 +0200, Raphael Hertzog wrote:

> On Fri, 02 May 2008, Sven Joachim wrote:
>> On the other hand, it is rather late in the release cycle, and the
>> release team would probably not be too happy if we remove cleanup-info
>> now. So the safe option would be to remove it in the master branch
>> only. Opinions?
>
> Agreed. Guillem wanted to remove it once the install-info issue had been
> sorted. But progress has been slower than expected on this front. I'm
> never quite sure if GNU's install-info has all the features now and what
> the next step is... maybe you could lead that effort?

>From the texinfo NEWS file and the output of the respective
`install-info --help' commands, I get the impression that all options of
dpkg's install-info are supported in texinfo's install-info as of
version 4.12 (which is not packaged for Debian yet). So, in principle
it would be possible to switch to GNU's install-info now¹ with the
following steps:

- create a separate install-info package from the texinfo source that
Replaces: dpkg (< 1.15.0)

- remove {cleanup,install}-info files from dpkg and let dpkg 1.15.x
pre-depend on install-info

But another question is: what exactly do we want from install-info?
Reading the threads from May 2006, there seems to be no consensus. Some
people want a database and recreate the dir file from that, like it's
done for the Debian menu, and GNU's install-info is probably unsuitable
for that.

Another feature that would be very desirable is triggers support. In
the long run, install-info should probably not be Priority: Required, as
it's only useful if a package providing info-browser is installed.

Regards,
Sven


¹ where (now = after lenny) or (now = in experimental)


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On Thu, 2008-05-22 at 16:36 +0200, Sven Joachim wrote:
> > Agreed. Guillem wanted to remove it once the install-info issue had been
> > sorted. But progress has been slower than expected on this front. I'm
> > never quite sure if GNU's install-info has all the features now and what
> > the next step is... maybe you could lead that effort?
>
> >From the texinfo NEWS file and the output of the respective
> `install-info --help' commands, I get the impression that all options of
> dpkg's install-info are supported in texinfo's install-info as of
> version 4.12 (which is not packaged for Debian yet). So, in principle
> it would be possible to switch to GNU's install-info now¹ with the
> following steps:
>
> - create a separate install-info package from the texinfo source that
> Replaces: dpkg (< 1.15.0)
>
> - remove {cleanup,install}-info files from dpkg and let dpkg 1.15.x
> pre-depend on install-info
>
> But another question is: what exactly do we want from install-info?

The ability to omit it entirely if DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS specifies "nodocs".
>From an Emdebian perspective, I would rather that dpkg did not
pre-depend on install-info - rather dpkg should be able to operate
without install-info ever existing. Not every usage of dpkg wants info
documents as well.

Currently, despite removing info documents from the rebuilt packages and
install-info calls from maintainer scripts, I still need to have a
useless /usr/bin/install-info containing #!/bin/sh - it would be nice to
not require such a hack, merely to dump documentation.

> Another feature that would be very desirable is triggers support. In
> the long run, install-info should probably not be Priority: Required, as
> it's only useful if a package providing info-browser is installed.

Agreed.

--
Neil Williams <codehelp@debian.org>


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On Thu, 22 May 2008, Sven Joachim wrote:
> >From the texinfo NEWS file and the output of the respective
> `install-info --help' commands, I get the impression that all options of
> dpkg's install-info are supported in texinfo's install-info as of
> version 4.12 (which is not packaged for Debian yet). So, in principle
> it would be possible to switch to GNU's install-info now¹ with the
> following steps:
>
> - create a separate install-info package from the texinfo source that
> Replaces: dpkg (< 1.15.0)
>
> - remove {cleanup,install}-info files from dpkg and let dpkg 1.15.x
> pre-depend on install-info
>
> But another question is: what exactly do we want from install-info?
> Reading the threads from May 2006, there seems to be no consensus. Some
> people want a database and recreate the dir file from that, like it's
> done for the Debian menu, and GNU's install-info is probably unsuitable
> for that.

I don't know the details to be able to judge properly, but from here it
looks fine.

> Another feature that would be very desirable is triggers support. In
> the long run, install-info should probably not be Priority: Required, as
> it's only useful if a package providing info-browser is installed.

Ack. But install-info has many options and you can't convey any
information with a file based trigger. So it will only work if all
info files can be "installed" without requiring specific parameters.

Also the trigger script has to find out alone which files is
new/updated/removed. So it requires a bit of work.

Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog

Le best-seller français mis à jour pour Debian Etch :
http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/


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On Do, 22 Mai 2008, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> Ack. But install-info has many options and you can't convey any
> information with a file based trigger. So it will only work if all
> info files can be "installed" without requiring specific parameters.

I once did a check of all the install-info calls in Debian/sid and most
were just created by dh_installinfo, so without any special options.
Only emacs and maybe 3-5 other packages did something special. So I
guess we can leave *these* packages to fix the entries in the info file
itself instead of changing the title etc in the install-info call.

> Also the trigger script has to find out alone which files is
> new/updated/removed. So it requires a bit of work.

Well, the idea was that the dir file is recreated every time. That would
not need any special thing.

Best wishes

Norbert

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at> Vienna University of Technology
Debian Developer <preining@debian.org> Debian TeX Group
gpg DSA: 0x09C5B094 fp: 14DF 2E6C 0307 BE6D AD76 A9C0 D2BF 4AA3 09C5 B094
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stay the patient course.
Of little worth is your ire.
The network is down.
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