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:

    >> 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.

    Miles> From my point of view (debian with some random stuff
    Miles> compiled from source in /usr/local), everything seems to
    Miles> work pretty well as-is.

You're a low-maintenance kinda guy, Miles.  ;-)  Considering that
(AFAIK) install-info was originally written for Debian by Ian Jackson
(and on my Debian systems it is still part of dpkg, not info or
texinfo), it's hardly surprising that it works on Debian.[1]

However, there is no "the" install process.  We have ours, you have
yours, upstream Lisp maintainers have theirs, Debian has its Emacs
Policy, the HP/UX Porting Centre has its own way, etc.  In the face of
that, I don't see how to guarantee that install-info will get run.  If
I don't have to, I don't want to think about it, either.

OTOH, if you run XEmacs, you will get a sensible Info Dir node, or
your money back.  ;-)  The approach I'm talking about _is_ "as-is" on
XEmacs, which works pretty well for us, too.  When we notice a problem
with indexing of an Info file we distribute, we patch the source with

+@dircategory ...
+@direntry ...
+ [...]
+@end direntry

This is invariably accepted immediately upstream, and if not, it is
trivial to maintain.  One problem + one patch = one solution---and no
thought required.  Maintainer Heaven!



Footnotes: 
[1]  Note also that Debian goes to extreme lengths to insure
cooperation of packages it distributes among themselves, and where
possible interoperation with other systems.

-- 
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