Re: Status of Debian Policy
On 15 Jun 1997, Ardo van Rangelrooij wrote:
> I have another policy issue which is related to topic 11 (see below).
>
> The current layout of Info entries in the main Info menu (in the file
> /usr/info/dir) looks rather messy. I found the following "descrepencies":
>
> - not all packages are placed in an appropriate section
> - the descriptions are not formatted consequently
> - some sections are somewhat large (this is personal)
> - some descriptions are somewhat large (this is personal too)
>
> I believe we can do better. Therefor, I propose an extension/change to
> Section 3.2.3 of the Debian Policy Manual:
Great! Thanks for the proposal. A few points though...
> - During install of an Info documents you MUST specify a section.
> Preferably use the section the package belongs to in the Debian
> distribution. As a starting point the "dir" file in the base-files
> package could already contain these sections, albeit empty.
>
> We could also use a different, sometimes more logical grouping. E.g.,
> I'm using the following sections for the development packages:
>
> - compilers
> - linkers
> - interpreters
> - generators (i.e. bison, flex, gperf, etc.)
> - libraries
> - development tools (i.e. make, gdb, etc.)
> - internals (i.e. gdb-internals, stabs, etc.)
>
> If the Info doc has a lot of subentries, make a separate section
> for it, as has been done for the GNU file, text, shell, and shar
> utilities.
I suggest that we define several sections which should be used. If someone
has an info file which does not fit anywhere, he has to ask on
debian-devel for it and it will eventually be added to the Policy Manual.
The current structure (of packages installed on my system) is:
Miscellaneous
Development
Document Preparation
Information
Emacs
Programming
teTeX
Graphics
Games
General Commands
Note, that only "Miscellaneous" has a colon (:) after it. This should be
changed...
Note, that AFAIK install-info automatically removes empty sections from
the "info dir". I think this is actually very good. I don't want to have
all those empty section in the dir file of the base system.
> - Start the description at a to-be-determined fixed position, e.g.
> first line at position 41 and second and subsequent lines at position
> 43. This unclutters the layout, but the positions should be such
> to leave enough room for a short, one-line, to-the-point decription.
Can't we simply change "install-info" to do this automatically? This would
make it a lot easier...
> - Instead of using the upstream provided description, provide an own
> one-line one which fits on the same line as the menu entry. A three
> line description for awk may be nice but clutters the layout, e.g.
Correct. (For example, the "Make" entry is _way_ too long.)
> In the light of topic 11 the above may be not that important anymore,
> but if we plan to keep Info docs around (I have not heard otherwise
> yet) I believe we should discuss the above.
I'm sure the info docs will be available in the future! The question of
topic 11 was which format the .deb's should ship:
- only info; html in extra .deb
- only html; info in extra .deb
- html _and_ info
> I was also wondering whether we plan to organize the documentation
> under dwww in a way similar to the Info docs (sectioning, layout,
> etc.). Anybody some thoughts on this?
I think Jim was working on such an enhancement for dwww. We should ask him
when his is back.
Cheers,
Chris
-- Christian Schwarz
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