/opt/local/share/info/dir contains defective content

[ballapete (Peter "Pete" Dyballa)]

Hello!

This files contains defective entries like

• config. status:

(autoconf)config.status Invocation. Recreating configurations.

(notice the empty space after the dots) and nonsense like

This is libtool. info, produced by makeinfo version 4.11 from

/Users/gary/Devo/libtool/doc/libtool.texi.

This is gettext. info, produced by makeinfo version 4.11 from

gettext.texi.

The former is put into the paragraph "GNU programming tools" and the latter is put among "Individual utilities."

[raimue (Rainer Müller)]

Probably related to #777. I don't know how GNU info works, so input on this topic would help to find a solution.

[ballapete (Peter "Pete" Dyballa)]

Replying to raimue@…:

Probably related to #777. I don't know how GNU info works, so input on this topic would help to find a solution.

No, that's not likely. The errors happen earlier. The INFO files created with makeinfo from TEXI files are already defective.

Once the INFO is created, it's probably installed into /opt/local/share/info. There a simple command, install-info <file.info> dir, is executed to add one or more entries and other stuff (for example a "paragraph" or INFO-DIR-SECTION name) into the dir file. The typical entries which info or GNU Emacs' info-mode display can be found between START-INFO-DIR-ENTRY and END-INFO-DIR-ENTRY in the INFO file.

A possible cause could be the line

\input texinfo

found in the TEXI files. It should correspond to the makeinfo utility. I'd recommend to use makeinfo from the active TeX distribution: it's likely that this utility will find the proper input.

[(none)]

Milestone Port Bugs deleted

[jmroot (Joshua Root)]

So... should this be assigned to the maintainers of the specific ports that created these defective entries? If not, what exactly needs to be done here?

[ballapete (Peter "Pete" Dyballa)]

Yes! It's simply not enough to create INFO files from the TEXI files and install them in /opt/local/share/info. Without a "dir" file in this directory GNU Emacs or xinfo (or any possible other INFO file reader) won't the documentation. A final step has to be:

pushd /opt/local/share/info
install-info <INFO file> dir
popd

The packages' Makefiles will have entries to install the INFO file(s) correctly. Maybe this fails in MacPorts due to the hard-linking which might leave something out or because someone decided to make it simpler to swap different versions of a software package.

[ballapete (Peter "Pete" Dyballa)]

Replying to Peter_Dyballa@…:

There is one thing to add: recent TeX Live distributions (2009, 2010) do not come with makeinfo and install-info. So one has to rely on Apple that it continues to include these tools and updates them.

[kencu (Ken)]

after 14 years, I don't see anything more to fix here