Re: Transition to GNU's install-info (was: Removing cleanup-info)
On Thu, 2008-05-22 at 16:36 +0200, Sven Joachim wrote:
> > Agreed. Guillem wanted to remove it once the install-info issue had been
> > sorted. But progress has been slower than expected on this front. I'm
> > never quite sure if GNU's install-info has all the features now and what
> > the next step is... maybe you could lead that effort?
>
> >From the texinfo NEWS file and the output of the respective
> `install-info --help' commands, I get the impression that all options of
> dpkg's install-info are supported in texinfo's install-info as of
> version 4.12 (which is not packaged for Debian yet). So, in principle
> it would be possible to switch to GNU's install-info now¹ with the
> following steps:
>
> - create a separate install-info package from the texinfo source that
> Replaces: dpkg (< 1.15.0)
>
> - remove {cleanup,install}-info files from dpkg and let dpkg 1.15.x
> pre-depend on install-info
>
> But another question is: what exactly do we want from install-info?
The ability to omit it entirely if DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS specifies "nodocs".
>From an Emdebian perspective, I would rather that dpkg did not
pre-depend on install-info - rather dpkg should be able to operate
without install-info ever existing. Not every usage of dpkg wants info
documents as well.
Currently, despite removing info documents from the rebuilt packages and
install-info calls from maintainer scripts, I still need to have a
useless /usr/bin/install-info containing #!/bin/sh - it would be nice to
not require such a hack, merely to dump documentation.
> Another feature that would be very desirable is triggers support. In
> the long run, install-info should probably not be Priority: Required, as
> it's only useful if a package providing info-browser is installed.
Agreed.
--
Neil Williams <codehelp@debian.org>
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