Re: Info files--declaration and distribution

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2005 19:01:20 +0100
> From: Stepan Kasal <address@hidden>
> Cc: Bob Rossi <address@hidden>, Akim Demaille <address@hidden>
> 
> > Let me know if we really need to debate this :).
> 
> But anyway, if you can invest a few minutes to explain me the possible
> troubles, I think I could learn from it.

I'm not Karl, but I will try.

> First, I said that without Texinfo, make doesn't install the info files.
> There two possible usages:
> 1) read it directly with emacs
> 2) install it manually (edit the dir file)
> 3) (Have I missed something?)
> 
> Which of the above is done often enough that you care about it?

It's 2).  People have been doing that for decades; install-info is a
relatively new thing, and even though I do have it, I still edit DIR
by hand most of the time, because (a) many @dircategory directives
want to place the entries not where I want them, and (b) quite a few
@direntry directives--how shall I put it?--Need Work(TM).

> BTW: Does emacs have something like M-x install-info-file, thus
> duplicating the functionality of install-info?

No.  What for? Emacs is an editor, so editing DIR is something that
comes naturally there ;-)

> Another question:
> I searched standards.info trying to find a place which says that *.info
> should be disstributed before I posted the proposal.  I haven't found it.
> Where is it?

standards.info, node "Standard Targets" says:

     Normally a GNU distribution comes with Info files, and that means
     the Info files are present in the source directory.  Therefore,
     the Make rule for an info file should update it in the source
     directory.  When users build the package, ordinarily Make will not
     update the Info files because they will already be up to date.

The node "Releases" there says:

       Naturally, all the source files must be in the distribution.  It is
    okay to include non-source files in the distribution, provided they are
    up-to-date and machine-independent, so that building the distribution
    normally will never modify them.  We commonly include non-source files
    produced by Bison, `lex', TeX, and `makeinfo'; this helps avoid
    unnecessary dependencies between our distributions, so that users can
    install whichever packages they want to install.