Re: Bug reports for texinfo (and 2 wishes)

[Norbert Preining]

Hi Karl!

On Son, 29 Jan 2006, Karl Berry wrote:
>     218557    dies with "Cannot find node `Top'"
> 
> That is a very long bug report, but what I need to fix the bug is the
> actual dir file which causes the crash, and I don't see it there.
> (Maybe it's there and I'm missing it amongst all the other stuff.)
> 
> I appreciate all the analysis and strace's and gdb transcripts and so
> on, but it doesn't help me reproduce it or confirm a fix.

I think that there are several things involved, some of them are in no
way realted to texinfo/info at all. What IS related is that info does
not warn if the dir files contains rubbish, or nothing.

Ok, this is a valid dir file (I suppose) but info might give a warning.

I think the most important part of this thread 
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=218557
is the email from Loïc Minier <address@hidden> from Fri, 1 Oct 2004.

He states that somehow his dir files was corrupted,i.e. contained only
binary 0 for 35k and then normal entries.

To quote him:
I think that some things are wrong on info's side here:
 - a part of the file only is corrupted, but neither did info mention it
   was corrupted, nor could it use the non-corrupted part, so I believe
   there is an "abort strategy" in place[1], but it doesn't expose
   failures,
 - install-info was called on a corrupted file, but succeeded[2].

The first part is interesting for you, the second part for those
provinding the debian install-info (and for you: I will take a look into
what is necessary to merge debian and gnu install-info).

He also gives the location in the source code where there seems to be
the problem. I would suggest you take a look only at his email, and see
if we can do something here.

Best wishes and thanks a lot

Norbert

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Dr. Norbert Preining <preining AT logic DOT at>             Università di Siena
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