Why is texinfo required?

ConnorBehan · 2009-06-19 18:25:23

I know info and doc stripping became disabled by default about a year ago but I always thought this meant "I'll have info pages on my system, I just won't use them." However I recently discovered that I have texinfo and that it was installed as a dependency by -Syu when info pages started coming out and it looks like it is a dependency of every package that has an info page. Why? I have lots of man pages installed but I don't have man-db installed, shouldn't info be the same way?

This sounds like a good time to bring up my growing discomfort with the doc situation. I can understand info pages being included... they provide useful information and they aren't THAT big. But doxygen dumps? These just comment every function in an API. Most people don't need these and developers who do will probably look at the package's website or the headers directly. I think most of the mass that has been accumulating in doc and gtk-doc is unnecessary. Perhaps you could be more selective about which docs you enable? And also I just discovered http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=2731. Was this considered that fateful year ago? If I modified makepkg to convert info2man automatically would the patch be accepted?

Alright I'm done... sorry for the rant. Time to rant about libtool .la files now... jk!

OH! Wait there is one more thing:

I didn't catch when gconf schemas were enabled. When did this happen and why? http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Gno … guidelines still advises against packaging gconf schemas.

Last edited by ConnorBehan (2009-06-19 18:28:11)

tomk · 2009-06-19 18:51:56

For the most relevant information about dev decisions, check on the arch-dev-public mailing list.

The bugtracker is a better place for feature requests, with or without patches.

bender02 · 2009-06-19 20:08:28

BTW the texinfo package is required since the .info files need to be indexed in the common /usr/share/info/dir 'index' file; since this file is common to all packages, this operation needs to be done from the .install file - and thus some texinfo stuff is needed when you *install* a package with .info docs, not just when you compile them. Manpages don't have a common 'index' file.

I don't see what's the problem with extra 2.5MB space taken by the texinfo package.

ConnorBehan · 2009-06-19 22:42:46

Ah that'd be why, thanks bender. I might also write a wrapper so that whenever pacman is run, a dummy PKGBUILD will be created for every package just accessed with docs and it will roll the contents into a new package without the docs and install that. Now can someone tell me what the deal is with schemas?

Arch Linux

#1 2009-06-19 18:25:23

Why is texinfo required?

#2 2009-06-19 18:51:56

Re: Why is texinfo required?

#3 2009-06-19 20:08:28

Re: Why is texinfo required?

#4 2009-06-19 22:42:46

Re: Why is texinfo required?

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