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

[Ludovic Courtès]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> skribis:

>> 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.

Actually they don’t overwrite it.  GDB/Binutils has:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
install-info: do-install-info dir.info
        s=`cd $(srcdir); ${PWD_COMMAND}`; export s; \
        if [ -f dir.info ] ; then \
          $(INSTALL_DATA) dir.info $(DESTDIR)$(infodir)/dir.info ; \
        else true ; fi
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Emacs seems to do something similar.

However, when installing into separate prefixes, they install their own
‘dir’, which is annoying in a one-prefix-per-package setup like Guix.

I think they should instead behave like Automake-based packages.  WDYT?

>>   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.

Sure, but perhaps these could just be removed from the ‘src’ tree now?

>> 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.

Well it’s convenient to have standards.info shipped with one of the
packages IMO, but either way is fine with me.

AFAICS no package installs maintain.info.

configure.info should clearly be part of Autoconf, though.

>> 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

Right.

> (which I think is what Texinfo does).

Perfect!

Thanks,
Ludo’.