Re: [help-texinfo] Adding info documents to /usr/share/info

[Chris Jones]

On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 09:22:04AM EDT, address@hidden wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 11:11:24PM -0400, Chris Jones wrote:

> > I am trying to add info documents to my local repository.
> > 
> > I am downloading info documents, which I copy to /usr/share/info.
> > 
> > I proceed to recreate the "dir" index via:
> > 
> > # for f in $(ls *.gz); do install-info $f; done
> 
> Hm. There seem to be more than one install-info (specifically: Debian's,
> Gnu's [1], [2]). Debian itself seems to be working on the move from
> Debian's version to Gnu's.

> > While this is running, I see a few "unable to determine description
> > for `dir' entry - giving up" messages.
> 
> Seems to be Debian's version guessing from the limited knowledge I
> have).

Yes. 

$ dpkg -S /usr/sbin/install-info
dpkg

> [...]
> 
> Cf. the references. Debian's install-info (the one you most probably are
> running) seems to rely on some heading format (and seems uncapable of
> installing correctly multi-section documents).

Yes. 

It looks like the issue is not direcly the "tar" in .tar.gz.. but rather
the fact that the "tar" implies a multifile document.

> On your system, Gnu's version is most probably called "ginstall-info".

Yes, and it's part of the "texinfo" package.

$ dpkg -S /usr/bin/ginstall-info
texinfo

> [...]
> 
> > All apologies if I looked in the wrong places [...]
> 
> No need to apologize. "Constantly looking in the wrong places" would be
> a good job description for what most of us do, right? ;-)

This would make a nice e-mail sig :-)

> [1] <http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-docs.html#s12.2>
> [2] <http://wiki.debian.org/Transitions/DpkgToGnuInstallInfo>
> 
> Hope those are useful pointers

I've spent the last couple of hours unsuccessfully trying to hunt down
the update-info-dir script that recreates the "dir" file from scratch.

Looks like my best bet at this point is to install texinfo from the
tarball - presumably in /usr/local and use that in the future, making
sure I backup the /usr/local/share/info directory before adding any
texinfo manual.

Comes as a bit of a suprise that such an venerable documentation system
as texinfo should be so "unstable" in debian "stable".

In any case thanks much for prompt response, and do let me know if you
can think of a more productive way of working around this issue.

CJ