info -w is slow for man pages

[Hilmar Preusse]

Dear developers,

I noticed that "info -w" is puzzlingly slow when the argument is a man page:

    $ time -p info -w ffmpeg-all
    *manpages*
    real 1.06
    user 1.47
    sys 0.16

In contrast, "man -w" is near-instantaneous:

    $ time -p man -w ffmpeg-all
    /usr/share/man/man1/ffmpeg-all.1.gz
    real 0.05
    user 0.04
    sys 0.01

Apparently this is because "info -w" calls "man -a", which is a very inefficent 
way to check if a man page exists:

    $ strace -f -e trace=execve -o '| grep -w man >&2' info -w ffmpeg-all > 
/dev/null
    1142  execve("/usr/bin/man", ["/usr/bin/man", "-a", "ffmpeg-all"], 
0xfffd7dd4 /* 52 vars */) = 0

The issue was reported for texinfo 6.8, but is reproducible w/ latest
checkout the git master. Please keep me in Cc, I'm not subscribed to
the list.

Hilmar
-- 
http://www.hilmar-preusse.de/

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature