Re: Using GNU's install-info in Debian instead of dpkg's install-info

[Norbert Preining]

Hi all!

On Son, 21 Mai 2006, Nicolas François wrote:
> > >  * detect if there are 2 arguments to the --section option
> > >  * detect if this second argument is a file
> > >    ("install-info --section section info-file dir-file" is a GNU 
> > > install-info
> > >    command line, it should not be taken as a dpkg command line:
> > >    "install-info --section regex section info-file")
> > > Of course if a file exists with the same name as the section, this
> > > algorithm doesn't work. But it doesn't seems to happen according to my dir
> > > file.
> > 
> > Karl, what do you think. Would this be acceptable to be merged into
> > install-info?
> 
> Maybe the change in Debian will have to be temporary (i.e. provide support
> for the current behavior of dpkg's i-i for a few (Debian) releases)
> 
> Supporting multiple arguments for an option in getopt is not really clean
> and having an option which accepts either one or two arguments is maybe
> not very clean either (I mean for upstream) (moreover, i-i accepts a
> variable number of parameters at the ends).

It also seemed to me that hacking this into upstream would not work out,
so I asked Karl.

If we can add the --section-regex argument which would be clean and
useful for upstream, too, we continue as planned before, moving
ginstall-info and the wrapper script into a new package.

> Maybe we can make a wrapper in Debian (something like the attached script)
> that will pass the first argument of the --section option to a new
> --section-regex option.  i.e. change

I will save it away for now.

And implementing the --sectin-regex seems to be a bit easier than
checking for 1 vs 2 argumetns.

I see only one problem: AFAIR the GNU install-info has to be minimal and
cannot rely on (many) other things. But here Karl should tell us more,
what the conditions are.

Best wishes

Norbert

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