Re: easy install and man-like behavior

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Tue, 12 Dec 2000, W. L. Estes wrote:

> > > > - along the same lines, the cron job could even build the info files
> > > >   from texinfo files (like catman does for nroff->ascii), so that
> > > >   `cp foo.texi /usr/local/doc' is all it takes to install a 
> > > > documentation
> 
> Actually, this is not so simple as it might seem. Some packages have
> their .texi files depending on other (non-texinfo) files to complete
> the creation of .info files. (E.g. you stick the version number of the
> package somewhere and have the .texi file include it in some way.)

You could have people copy the entire `doc' subdirectory of the source
distribution to a package-specific subdirectory under /usr/local/doc
(you need subdirectories anyway, or else you will have file-name
clashes with files such as version.texi).  Then the cron job should do
"make install-info" instead of invoking makeinfo directly, because
some packages do all kinds of tricks, like running Sed to create .texi
files from templates, etc.

Alternatively, you could simply add the directory name where the
Texinfo sources are to some data base which the cron job accesses.
Then cron could simply do a "cd /foo/bar/wherever; make install-info".