[ Thread Index |
Date Index
| More lists.liballeg.org/allegro-developers Archives
]
Michael Bukin <M.A.Bukin@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> I think we should leave it for the user to decide which program to use for
> adding entries in the dir file. Users could just use
> INSTALL_INFO_DIR=/path/to/install-info on the make command line and we can
> detect that INSTALL_INFO_DIR does not point anywhere and suggest
> specifying INSTALL_INFO_DIR as workaround.
But that requires all users to have at least some understanding of what
install-info is/does, and what the info dir file is for. I suspect that not
everyone will have come across this stuff before (and IMHO they shouldn't
have to), so it would be nice if we could do it all automatically.
How to other Unix packages manage this? Do they just not autoinstall the
info docs at all? In which case maybe we ought to follow suit and leave this
totally up to the user. If we are going to automate it, though, I'd like to
put this in the configure script and at least have it check for
install-info in a couple of the more obvious places before it gives up.
>> But then surely we would just end up adding our entry to a separate dir
>> file, rather than the main one the system is using?
>
> Both standalone info and info reader in Emacs combine contents of several
> dir files found in directories specified in INFOPATH, through options or
> in standard directories into one virtual dir file. Both /usr/info and
> /usr/local/info are usually in the default INFOPATH. If other info readers
> could not read several dir files, that's not our fault.
This doesn't work for me. My system has the real dir file in /etc/info-dir,
with /usr/info/dir a symlink to this (which was installed by default), and
/usr/local/info/dir another symlink to it (which was created by Allegro). If
I break these symlinks, the standalone info reader uses /usr/info/dir if
that exists, or /usr/local/info/dir if I delete /usr/info/dir, but I can't
see any signs of it merging the two.
Perhaps we just ought to not bother with this, if it is going to be so
problematic. But if we do attempt to autoinstall (which I think is nice), it
seems to me that creating the extra symlink in /usr/local/info is kind of
pointless (and as you say, this breaks on your system where that directory
doesn't support symlinks). Since we have already figured out where we are
trying to symlink it to, why can't we just point install-info at the final
destination of where we want that main dir file to live?
--
Shawn Hargreaves - shawn@xxxxxxxxxx - http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/
"A binary is barely software: it's more like hardware on a floppy disk."