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

[Brandon Invergo]

I'll weigh in on this since I just did a big overhaul on info-file
installation in GSRC.

> Seems to me that {configure,standards}.info should be installed
> exclusively by Autoconf.

These files have been automatically blocked in GSRC since its original
GAR days.  By the way, another problem file is libiberty, which is
installed by a couple different packages (binutils, libc and gcc,
maybe?) 

I made a separate package in GSRC for installing standards.info and
maintain.info directly from the gnustandards CVS repo.  For my sake, at
least, it reduces the (admittedly not very big) overhead of manually
installing an info file downloaded from gnu.org/prep.  So that's handy.
It also makes updating it easy.  As for the argument about whether
maintain.info should be installed by a package at all, I actually agree
with Karl.  But I figured that this way, any GNU dev using GSRC
(*crickets*) could install those with no effort.

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

Here's where I actually put in a lot of work.  dir is also blocked from
being installed by any package since the olden days.  As far as I can
tell, since GAR was developed, they just left it with this problem that
the dir file would only contain the entry for the last-installed
package, since install-info would be run on a dir file in the package
prefix and stow would overwrite any dir file that was previously
installed.

Now, I have set up a post-install hook that does the install-info
command into a common dir file located in the system prefix, which is,
of course, created if it doesn't yet exist.  This required going back
and finding every info file installed by each package and running
install-info on them.  In the end, dir itself is an orphan file as far
as GSRC is concerned.  I know that this is also how it's done by pacman,
the package manager for Arch, Parabola, etc.  I'm not sure how apt or
yum does it.

Brandon

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