Re: Using GNU's install-info in Debian instead of dpkg's install-info
On Tue, 2006-05-23 at 20:14:32 -0700, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
> It's wrong on two counts:
> 1/ The visual format of the dir file is used for collecting the sections.
> This has all the robustness of, say, grepping for text in a Postscript file.
>
> 2/ Since no record is kept of the individual additions by packages,
> there's no way to recreate the dir file from scratch. So, if a package
> does screw up (often due to 1 above), all one can do is manually edit
> the dirfile. This happens maddeningly often, at least to me:
> see #367255, #367254, #367251.
> There are two proper fixes. One is in the realm of policy: require
> every info file passed to install-info to contain the full metadata,
> including INFO-DIR-SECTION. Then we can dispense with the --section
> option completely and 1 magically goes away, while 2 is solved by
> rescanning the metadata in the top-level installed files (as Joey
> suggests in the other thread).
The nice property of this one, is that then we can conditionally
call install-info on maintainer scripts, and make the new package
where install-info is going to be move to, non-essential (after a
transition phase). I'd go for this one.
regards,
guillem
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