Re: INFO on add-ons

[David A. Cobb]

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> > > > > > "Miles" == Miles Bader <address@hidden> writes:
> > > > > >            
>    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.
I don't see /any/ Free/Open Software project in a position to be anal 
about things.  I have no concept of anyone coercing a contributer in any 
regard - it'll cost you at least $30.00/hr to coerce /me/.

But it would be a considerable good if they did contribute Info pages 
and if installing the software also installed the info.  My notion was 
more an encouraging word in the documents we publish to guide the 
potential contributer.

>    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.
I dunno specifically /where/!  What I would hope for would be when I 
download, say, DoxyMacs from SourceForge I get a tar archive that 
includes the Info pages.  As for automatic installation, that shows my 
current Windoze milieu.  I think a script to take the bugs out of 
installing is a positive good thing.  If you do "$ configure  ...; make" 
then "Info" should be among the targets and should wind up doing "$ 
install-info" during "$ make install"
Windoze users should, IMNSHO, get a shell / cmd.exe script if not 
something like the Cygwin netinstaller because they are accustomed to 
one-step installation.
--

David A. Cobb, Software Engineer, Public Access Advocate
"By God's Grace I am a Christian man, by my actions a great sinner." -- The Way 
of a Pilgrim; R. M. French, tr.
Life is too short to tolerate crappy software.
.