On 15 Jun 1997, Ardo van Rangelrooij wrote: > I have another policy issue which is related to topic 11 (see below). > > The current layout of Info entries in the main Info menu (in the file > /usr/info/dir) looks rather messy. I found the following "descrepencies": > > - not all packages are placed in an appropriate section > - the descriptions are not formatted consequently > - some sections are somewhat large (this is personal) > - some descriptions are somewhat large (this is personal too) > > I believe we can do better. Therefor, I propose an extension/change to > Section 3.2.3 of the Debian Policy Manual:
Great! Thanks for the proposal. A few points though... > - During install of an Info documents you MUST specify a section. > Preferably use the section the package belongs to in the Debian > distribution. As a starting point the "dir" file in the base-files > package could already contain these sections, albeit empty. > > We could also use a different, sometimes more logical grouping. E.g., > I'm using the following sections for the development packages: > > - compilers > - linkers > - interpreters > - generators (i.e. bison, flex, gperf, etc.) > - libraries > - development tools (i.e. make, gdb, etc.) > - internals (i.e. gdb-internals, stabs, etc.) > > If the Info doc has a lot of subentries, make a separate section > for it, as has been done for the GNU file, text, shell, and shar > utilities. I suggest that we define several sections which should be used. If someone has an info file which does not fit anywhere, he has to ask on debian-devel for it and it will eventually be added to the Policy Manual. The current structure (of packages installed on my system) is: Miscellaneous Development Document Preparation Information Emacs Programming teTeX Graphics Games General Commands Note, that only "Miscellaneous" has a colon (:) after it. This should be changed... Note, that AFAIK install-info automatically removes empty sections from the "info dir". I think this is actually very good. I don't want to have all those empty section in the dir file of the base system. > - Start the description at a to-be-determined fixed position, e.g. > first line at position 41 and second and subsequent lines at position > 43. This unclutters the layout, but the positions should be such > to leave enough room for a short, one-line, to-the-point decription. Can't we simply change "install-info" to do this automatically? This would make it a lot easier... > - Instead of using the upstream provided description, provide an own > one-line one which fits on the same line as the menu entry. A three > line description for awk may be nice but clutters the layout, e.g. Correct. (For example, the "Make" entry is _way_ too long.) > In the light of topic 11 the above may be not that important anymore, > but if we plan to keep Info docs around (I have not heard otherwise > yet) I believe we should discuss the above. I'm sure the info docs will be available in the future! The question of topic 11 was which format the .deb's should ship: - only info; html in extra .deb - only html; info in extra .deb - html _and_ info > I was also wondering whether we plan to organize the documentation > under dwww in a way similar to the Info docs (sectioning, layout, > etc.). Anybody some thoughts on this? I think Jim was working on such an enhancement for dwww. We should ask him when his is back. Cheers, Chris -- Christian Schwarz Do you know [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], Debian GNU/Linux? [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Visit PGP-fp: 8F 61 EB 6D CF 23 CA D7 34 05 14 5C C8 DC 22 BA http://www.debian.org http://fatman.mathematik.tu-muenchen.de/~schwarz/ -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .