Re: Standards for INFO-DIR-SECTION names?

[Peter J. Farley III]

At 09:16 AM 2/21/02 +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>On Thu, 21 Feb 2002, Peter J. Farley III wrote:
>
>> Apologies if this is not the right list to ask, but are there any
>> standards for INFO-DIR-SECTION names?
>
>There are none AFAIK, but you can get some guidance from the file
>dir-example that comes with the Texinfo distribution.

Thanks, I'll check that out.

<Snipped>
>IMHO, the order and the groupings are not so important, because just
>typing "info foo" should either take you to the manual whose entry
>starts with "foo" in the DIR's menu, or complain that it doesn't find 

>such an entry.

All well and good if you already know the name of the tool you need 
help with, but what about the poor sots (including we "power" users) 
who can't remember the name of that nifty utility that does exactly 
what we need to do?  Or the total newbie who doesn't know the names of 
any utilities, because she's just beginning to learn?  In those cases, 
it *does* help if there are broad (but not overly broad) section names 
that at least somewhat describe the collective abilities of a grouping 
of programs, doesn't it?

As a small example, none of textutils, fileutils, binutils, or sh-utils 
contains an INFO-DIR-SECTION entry, and all of these extremely useful 
tools winds up scattered in alphabetical order under 
"Miscellaneous".  That's not very helpful when you're *looking* for the 
right tool to do a particular task.

Would it really hurt or annoy if these tool packages each had their own 
INFO-DIR-SECTION?  And how much work is it to accomplish that?  Not 
much, I think, in either case.
---------------------------------------------------------
Peter J. Farley III (address@hidden)