Re: questions about install-info

[Dale Scheetz <dwarf@polaris.net>]

On 7 Sep 1998, Gregory S. Stark wrote:

> 
> Dale Scheetz <dwarf@polaris.net> writes:
> 
> > The glibc INSTALL file says:
> > 
> >      On some Debian Linux based systems the `install-info' program
> >      supplied with the system works differently from the one we expect.
> 
> Yes, this is an issue, our install-info takes the same arguments as the
> install-info which comes with info, but interprets them differently. This is
> realy really bad. 
> 
> KTH Kerberos also had a problem with this, their install rules try to run
> install-info if it's available and does entirely the wrong thing on Debian
> machines. Of course in the package I can work around that, but the upstream
> developers are asking me again what they should do and I honestly have no idea
> how they should handle this situation. I'm inclined to tell them to ignore the
> "Debian problem" since it's our fault and hope we'll fix the situation
> eventually. That of course doesn't really help any users who try to build KTH
> Kerberos from the source distribution, but I can't think of any good way of
> dealing.
> 
> The only solution I can imagine is to change the arguments to our install-info
> to be consistent with the GNU install-info, then do some fancy coding in
> packages to handle both cases. 
> 
Why can't dpkg distribute the GNU version of install-info? If dpkg "needs"
features that are not found there, what is to keep those features from
being added to the GNU version in a "non-distructive" fashion?

Thanks,

Dwarf
--
_-_-_-_-_-   Author of "The Debian Linux User's Guide"  _-_-_-_-_-_-

aka   Dale Scheetz                   Phone:   1 (850) 656-9769
      Flexible Software              11000 McCrackin Road
      e-mail:  dwarf@polaris.net     Tallahassee, FL  32308

_-_-_-_-_-_- If you don't see what you want, just ask _-_-_-_-_-_-_-