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

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi, Brandon!

Brandon Invergo <address@hidden> skribis:

>> 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?) 

Yep.

Personally I’d prefer if the problem could be addressed in those
packages, rather than having to special-case a bunch of files like these
in GSRC/Guix.  That seems doable.

[...]

>> 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.

Thanks for sharing your experience.  Guix doesn’t build a meaningful
‘dir’ file yet, but the idea would be to do something like you describe
(this has to be done on a per-profile basis.)

Ludo’.