Re: Who owns dir and {standards,configure}.info?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès)
> Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2013 10:34:50 +0100
> 
> Several Info files have been distributed and installed by several
> packages for a long time, notably:
> 
>   dir – installed by Emacs, GCC, GDB

'dir' should not be installed, it should be updated by running
install-info.  I suggest to file bug reports against packages that
overwrite (as opposed to update) 'dir' with their versions.

>   configure.info – installed by GDB and Binutils
>   standards.info – installed by GDB, Binutils, Autoconf

I always do (e.g., for GDB) "cd gdb && make install", to avoid
installing anything but GDB itself and its related files.

> The problem is that it makes it difficult as a user to choose the right
> version.  (Typically with Guix there’s a collision when computing the
> union of the installation directories of these packages.)
> 
> Seems to me that {configure,standards}.info should be installed
> exclusively by Autoconf.

standards.info and maintain.info are distributed separately from
gnu.org, I think no package should install them by default.

> As for the initial ‘dir’, I think it would make sense to have it
> installed by Texinfo only.

Only if 'dir' does not already exist (which I think is what Texinfo
does).