Re: Info disaster?
Daniel Pittman <daniel(a)danann.net> writes:
On 07 Jan 2000, Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic(a)iskon.hr> wrote:
> I've been seeing this for quite a while, but I haven't had time to do
> anything about it, so I kinda hoped it'd go away. The thing is, when
> I first start info, I see these messages (in chronological order):
[...]
> What the <beep> is it?
Info mode is looking in the files to build a usable `dir' file.
This would be a bad idea (read: slow) even if the files were not
gzipped. Shouldn't we just list the info files without opening them?
Or, couldn't XEmacs do the charade *once*, and then cache the results.
(Yes, I know XEmacs can write out the created `dir' file, but that's
out of the question because I don't have write permissions on
/usr/share/info.)
Debian, bless their little soul, have `dir.gz' in the directory
with
nothing listed.
You're quite right. I wonder how the standalone info reader gets away
with it. A little straceing reveals that it never bothers with
/usr/share/info/dir.gz -- it simply reads /usr/info/dir/. Which is
weird, because /usr/share/info/ is supposed to be the canonical Info
location on Debian. It seems, however, that /usr/info/dir happily
indexes the contents of *both* /usr/info and /usr/share/info.
Bless their little soul, indeed.
> Even on my all-cool 500MHz pentium at work, unzipping all that
junk
> takes some time. Before I hack into the code, does anyone know what's
> supposed to be happening?
I don't get this until the first time I invoke Info mode,
That's when I get it too. Since I use Info quite often, that's sort
of unsatisfactory.
The variable that controls it is:
(defcustom Info-auto-generate-directory 'if-missing
"*When to auto generate an info directory listing.
Possible values are:
nil or `never' never auto-generate a directory listing,
use any existing `dir' or `localdir' file and ignore info
directories containing none
`always' auto-generate a directory listing ignoring existing
`dir' and `localdir' files
`if-missing', the default, auto-generates a directory listing
if no `dir' or `localdir' file is present. Otherwise the
contents of any of these files is used instead.
`if-outdated' auto-generates a directory listing if the `dir'
and `localdir' are either inexistent or outdated (touched
less recently than an info file in the same directory)."
This does not sound promising. I haven't changed the default, and I
suffer this highly problematic behaviour. How can we adapt to the
situation?