Re: Info disaster?
On 08 Jan 2000, Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic(a)iskon.hr> wrote:
Daniel Pittman <daniel(a)danann.net> writes:
> On 07 Jan 2000, Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic(a)iskon.hr> wrote:
[...]
> 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?
I didn't find the performance bad enough to be a problem on my old
P-166/80MB machine; it's certainly not on my current system.
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.)
Ditto. Caching the results would be the best plan, I think, if there is
not write access to the real `dir' file.
> 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.
Hrk. Ugh. I will give you twenty dollars to ten cents that I know why,
too. The Debian documentation in unstable has been migrating from
/usr/ to /usr/share/.
Until that's done, I suspect that /usr/info/dir is the canonical
location for `dir' :/
[...]
> The variable that controls it is:
>
> (defcustom Info-auto-generate-directory 'if-missing
> "*When to auto generate an info directory listing.
[...]
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?
Change the default to 'never? Not very friendly though; this will fail
to display the info files when `dir' really isn't there.
Erm, maybe info mode can be made smarter about this or something. I
don't think it's that big a problem though.
Daniel
--
May the Forces of Evil become confused on the way to your house.
-- George Carlin