[bug] Trailing whitespace in dir files

[e9dc3863]

While setting up global-whitespace-mode in Emacs, I've found the following bug
(which, by the way, isn't specific to Emacs Info mode):

When install-info splits a long description over several lines, it leaves
a blank character (understood as ' ' or '\t' in this context by install-info) on
the first line, even if the corresponding line in the .texi source file doesn't
end with such a character.

Here's an example from Emacs docs (doc/misc/cc-mode.texi in emacs source tree):

-- BEGIN -----------------------------------------------------------------------
@direntry
* CC Mode: (ccmode).            Emacs mode for editing C, C++, Objective-C,
                                  Java, Pike, AWK, and CORBA IDL code.
@end direntry
-- END -------------------------------------------------------------------------

When added to the dir file via

$ texinfo-6.3/install-info/ginstall-info ccmode.info.gz dir

this becomes

-- BEGIN -----------------------------------------------------------------------
* CC Mode: (ccmode).            Emacs mode for editing C, C++, Objective-C, 
                                  Java, Pike, AWK, and CORBA IDL code.
-- END -------------------------------------------------------------------------

Extending the last description line to make install-info wrap the description
more than once reveals that trailing blanks would be left on all output lines
but the last one. The file example.texi, which illustrates this behaviour and
the patch that fixes the bug can be found in attachments.

I'm not familiar with SVN, but according to available tarballs the bug was
introduced in 4.12. The comment above the post-increment statement hints at the
possibility that this might be the intended behaviour, but I still hope that it
would be fixed in subsequent releases.

If the supplied code change(s) or their variations would be considered worthy
of inclusion in the project, I'd like none of the aliases, nicknames, email
addresses and other identifiers associated with me or my messages to be
mentioned in VCS commit messages/logs and changelogs.

Anonymous contributor

example.texi
Description: TeXInfo document

texinfo-6.3-install-info-trailing-whitespace-fix.diff
Description: Text document