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

[Ian Zimmerman]

Eli> The code doesn't use any regular expressions, it uses exact text
Eli> comparison (strcmp and the like).  

It must take account of the context in some way: section names can
appear elsewhere in the dir file.

I am not saying that this problem is unsolvable in theory.  I am
saying that it is so error prone that bugs will always be present,
and the annoyance factor of the bugs is very high if there's no
global regeneration.

Eli> In a nutshell, the program reads the entire DIR file into memory,
Eli> builds the data structure that reflects what's in the menu
Eli> (i.e. all the sections and the menu items found in each section),
Eli> then sorts each section alphabetically and adds the new entries in
Eli> the right place in each section specified in the Info file or the
Eli> command line.  Then it produces a new DIR file from the data
Eli> structure built in memory.

Well, this is both better and worse than I thought.  Better, because
no slicing, but worse, because parsing the whole file amplifies the
parsing problem.

Eli> FWIW, I don't see any show-stoppers for now, nothing that a bunch
Eli> of options cannot resolve.  If we have options that leave everybody
Eli> happy, we should be able to merge, don't you think?

I'd be happy with an option that regenerates the dirfile from the info
files.  Would the GNU side accept such an option?

-- 
A true pessimist won't be discouraged by a little success.