Re: Status of Debian Policy
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Christian Schwarz <schwarz@monet.m.isar.de> writes:
>
> 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.
>
I completely agree!
> 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...
>
On my system there's also "Networking", "Communication", and "Console
utilities". This made me think about using the package organization
in the distribution as a starting point.
> 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.
>
The removal of empty sections can be controlled by command line
options (see the man page for an excellent explanation). I agree
empty sections don't look good.
> > - 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...
>
I was thinking the same and see three possibilities to handle this:
1. using install-info directly with correct command line options
2. using a script (implicit call of install-info using the default
positions, possibly with override if absolutely necessary)
3. hard-coded in install-info (i.e. change current defaults values)
Option 3 is the most easiest, since it only requires the Info package
maintainer to handle things. Options 1 and 2 require all packages
containing an Info file to be updated, either to call the script or to
change the currently used command line. Option 2 is in fact the
soft-coded version of option 3.
Initially, I would say we go for option 3, since I assume the Info
package is not that often affected by a new upstream version.
However, handling the empty section removal may make option 2 more
suitable, unless we hard code that in install-info itself too.
> > - 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
> Do you know schwarz@monet.m.isar.de, schwarz@schwarz-online.com,
> Debian GNU/Linux? schwarz@debian.org, schwarz@mathematik.tu-muenchen.de
>
> Visit PGP-fp: 8F 61 EB 6D CF 23 CA D7 34 05 14 5C C8 DC 22 BA
> http://www.debian.org http://fatman.mathematik.tu-muenchen.de/~schwarz/
>
>
>
>
Greetings,
Ardo
- --
Ardo van Rangelrooij
home email: ardo.van.rangelrooij@tip.nl
home page: http://www.tip.nl/users/ardo.van.rangelrooij
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