On Sun, Mar 31, 2013 at 12:59 AM, Mike Frysinger <[email protected]> wrote: > the new texinfo-5.x series has rewritten makeinfo in perl. the main `info` > program is still in pure C. > > when it comes to packages installing .info pages, it's largely limited to the > GNU projects as the format has never really caught on. many of those projects > also install man pages. > > personally, i've never found info pages usable. for most utils, the man pages > or the --help output is sufficient, and for people doing heavy development, > the > online html manuals are significantly more useful.
agreed. > > when it was pure C, i could live with it as it's only <1MiB and no real deps > to speak of. now it's more like 3MiB, and pulls in 3 semi-uncommon additional > perl packages (not to mention perl itself). > > it's in @system for two reasons: it provides `info` and `makeinfo`. the > former is for reading info pages (i.e. RDEPEND) while the latter is used for > generating info pages (i.e. DEPEND) when the tarball didn't ship with them > pregenerated (they usually do). > > one option would be to make the makeinfo stuff into a USE flag so all the perl > junk isn't pulled in by default. only the packages that actually generate > info pages can DEPEND on that. > > it'd be simpler if we just dropped it altogether from @system. if people want > `info`, they can `emerge` it themselves. if packages want `makeinfo`, they > can DEPEND on it -- few fall into this category (<100 by a rough survey of > random Gentoo installs). > > obviously my preference is for the latter. > -mike I agree with the later as well. -- Doug Goldstein
