Re: INFO on add-ons

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

>>>>> "Miles" == Miles Bader <miles@lsi.nec.co.jp> writes:

    Miles> "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> writes:

    David> to provide an Info source covering their software, and that
    David> any installation process ought to support this by merging
    David> these (INSTALL-INFO) with the Emacs Info.Dir?

    >> That's a maintenance nightmare

    Miles> How so?  It seem to work well enough if people consistently
    Miles> use `install-info' (and that actually seems to happen on
    Miles> debian at least).

I have no control over "people", and little enough over XEmacs.
Better to spend the effort on having Emacs be smart about the info
files themselves, which either it can read or it doesn't matter, than
to have GNU and XEmacs.ORG try be anal about stuff that's not under
our control.  IMO.

    >> and often impossible on real OSes where not everyone is root.

    Miles> People certainly have write access to the `dir' file in any
    Miles> directory they write info files to.  Since info merges all
    Miles> the different `dir' files into the final buffer at
    Miles> run-time, that's all that's needed.

That's fine, but I got the impression David was talking about the
specific dir file in the info directory where Emacs stuff resides.
What you're describing is just a "pre-caching" version of XEmacs's
current strategy.

    >> What's wrong with the current (XEmacs only?) system which
    >> automatically generates Dir from the info-path?

    Miles> I'm not sure exactly what you mean; as I mentioned above,
    Miles> emacs merges all the various `dir' files.

AFAIK, install-info looks at @dircategory and @direntry.  Well, so
does XEmacs, and it gives them priority over dir.  The main issue here
is time spent in gunzip (and I'm not sure if that is anything but
process overhead, ie, with a zlib-capable Emacs this might go away),
otherwise it works well.

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