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