On Tue, 2006-05-23 at 20:14:32 -0700, Ian Zimmerman wrote: > It's wrong on two counts: > 1/ The visual format of the dir file is used for collecting the sections. > This has all the robustness of, say, grepping for text in a Postscript file. > > 2/ Since no record is kept of the individual additions by packages, > there's no way to recreate the dir file from scratch. So, if a package > does screw up (often due to 1 above), all one can do is manually edit > the dirfile. This happens maddeningly often, at least to me: > see #367255, #367254, #367251.
> There are two proper fixes. One is in the realm of policy: require > every info file passed to install-info to contain the full metadata, > including INFO-DIR-SECTION. Then we can dispense with the --section > option completely and 1 magically goes away, while 2 is solved by > rescanning the metadata in the top-level installed files (as Joey > suggests in the other thread). The nice property of this one, is that then we can conditionally call install-info on maintainer scripts, and make the new package where install-info is going to be move to, non-essential (after a transition phase). I'd go for this one. regards, guillem -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
