Re: Using GNU's install-info in Debian instead of dpkg's install-info

[Karl Berry]

    Right.  I have a hard time waiting for the merge to complete.

Well, we're closer to a merge than at any time in the last 10 years or
so (since whenever Debian install-info came into existence), so there is
some cause for hope :).

    Good question, and easy to answer with a simple script, at least relative
    to the packages I have installed.  I'll do that within a few days.

Great, thanks.

    Everything necessary for the installation of a menu entry.  I guess it's
    all within INFO-DIR-ENTRY, isn't it?

As far as I can think of, but ...

    It wouldn't be visible to end users, and packages would interact with it
    through a narrow interface (ie. the revamped install-info).  

In my experience, it is *useful* for people to be able to edit the dir
file.  I don't think we should make it harder to do so, by only allowing
changes through some other file and a regeneration process.  I don't see
that we gain anything critical by it.

I like the idea of being able to regenerate the dir file from installed
info files much more.  And in fact the Texinfo distribution includes
several scripts (fix-info-dir, gen-dir-node, maybe others) to do just
that.  None of them ever seemed to be "installable" quality.  If that
can be added to install-info (yikes) or one or another of the scripts
made more robust so it could be a standard installed program, that would
be great.

Thanks,
Karl