Package: dpkg
Version: 1.10.9
Severity: normal
Tag: patch
Something is causing very long titles in the info pages, and this is
leading to stuff like this in the info dir file:
* Date input formats: (coreutils)Date input formats.
* autoconf: (autoconf)autoconf Invocation. How to create
configuration scripts
That shove the descriptions over to a 20 or so character wide column.
The overall result makes it a lot harder to read the descriptions than I
recall it being before:
* Bfd: (bfd). The Binary File
Descriptor library.
* Binutils: (binutils). The GNU binary utilities.
* ar: (binutils)ar. Create, modify, and
extract from archives
* gprof: (gprof). Profiling your program's
execution
* XaoS: (xaos). The fast realtime
interactive fractal
zoomer
* xzgv: (xzgv). A picture viewer for X,
with a thumbnail-based
file selector.
* Festival: (festival). The `Festival' Speech
Synthesis System a
general text to speech
system for making your
computer talk and
developing new synthesis
techniques.
The main cause of the problem seems to be a few packages (coreutils,
autoconf), that choose to use one info file for a number of topics, and
register all of those topic in the top-level info dir. That means that
they have to use rather long info references, like "(coreutils)Date
input formats". The result is a long line which given the current
way install-info lays out the dir file, shoves every description into a
narrow column, with much word-wrapping.
Since I can see no way for the coreutils package to cut this line down,
really, I began to think about reformatting the info dir instead. I have
a patch that makes the descriptions be laid out in a way reminiscent
of .TP lines on man pages, letting descriptions always start in column
40 (not ideal, but I haven't tried to make it adaptively pick the best
column yet). The result looks pretty good most of the time:
* Bfd: (bfd). The Binary File Descriptor library.
* Binutils: (binutils). The GNU binary utilities.
* ar: (binutils)ar. Create, modify, and extract from
archives
Looks reasonable for items with longer descriptions:
* XaoS: (xaos). The fast realtime interactive fractal
zoomer
* xzgv: (xzgv). a picture viewer for X, with a
thumbnail-based file selector.
* Festival: (festival). The `Festival' Speech Synthesis System
a general text to speech system for
making your computer talk and
developing new synthesis techniques.
And is still readable, though not pretty, for items with oversize
title + references:
* GNU Utilities: (coreutils). GNU Utilities.
* Common options: (coreutils)Common options.
Common options.
* File permissions: (coreutils)File permissions.
Access modes.
* Date input formats: (coreutils)Date input formats.
With the patch install-info converts the dir file over to the new layout
without problems. I'm only changing whitespace, so none of the dir parsing
seems to break.
Here's the patch:
--- /usr/sbin/install-info 2002-09-15 14:36:46.000000000 -0400
+++ install-info 2002-11-01 14:24:28.000000000 -0500
@@ -408,12 +408,20 @@
}
@work = @work[0..$j];
+my $descalign=40;
+
@newwork = ();
foreach ( @work ) {
if ( m/^(\* *[^:]+: *\(\w[^\)]*\)[^.]*\.)[ \t]*(.*)/ ||
m/^([ \t]+)(.*)/ ) {
- $_ = $1 . ( " " x ( $length - length($1) + 1 ) ) . $2;
- push @newwork, split( "\n", wrap('', " " x ( $length + 1 ), $_ ) );
+ if (length $1 >= $descalign) {
+ push @newwork, $1;
+ $_=(" " x $descalign) . $2;
+ }
+ else {
+ $_ = $1 . (" " x ($descalign - length $1)) . $2;
+ }
+ push @newwork, split( "\n", wrap('', " " x $descalign, $_ ) );
} else {
push @newwork, $_;
}
The obvious enhancement is to make it calculate $descalign better.
The current value of 40 works pretty well for what we have now, and
it should probably not exceed 40 (or we'd go back to the current situation
of not having enough space for the descriptions). It could easily be less
than 40 for some info dirs though.
--
see shy jo
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