install-info and LSB

Jack Howarth howarth at bromo.msbb.uc.edu
Sat Aug 31 08:03:14 PDT 2002


    Has there ever been any discussion of the binary
/usr/sbin/install-info in terms of the Linux Standard
Base? I ask because dpkg is providing a perl based
version of this utility whereas all other distros
appear to be using binary only version. This came up
because the regex in perl 5.80 is buggy and breaks
the perl install-info for building glibc now. As a
workaround I rebuilt texinfo-4.2 with all of the redhat
install-info related patches and substituted this 
binary only version for the one dpkg installs. While
this version is sufficient for building the packages 
there does appear to be some incompatibilities related
to installing glibc-doc with this version of install-info.
    I am wondering if we aren't violating the spirit
if not the letter of LSB by using a non-standard version
of install-info. Wouldn't it be better to move install-info
out of dpkg, add any required additional functionality
to the texinfo version of install-info and push those
changes upstream to the texinfo maintainers? Since 
install-info is being called at both the Makefile level
in builds as well as at the packager level (eg rpm or
dpkg) it seems that we would be much better off if the
install-info used by debian was uniform with what 
everyone else is using (be it a perl or binary version).
Any comments?
                           Jack




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