Re: Playground pager lsp(1)

From: Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0123@gmail.com>
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
Cc: "G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>,
	alx.manpages@gmail.com, dirk@gouders.net,
	linux-man@vger.kernel.org, help-texinfo@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Playground pager lsp(1)
Date: Fri, 7 Apr 2023 12:03:48 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <ZC/4lA46mZX1nFY0@starmint> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <83fs9cp5b9.fsf@gnu.org>

On Fri, Apr 07, 2023 at 09:36:10AM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> This should be possible, but it flies in the face of the feature
> whereby formatted man pages are kept for future perusal, which is
> therefore faster: if the formatted pages reflect the particular size
> of the pager's window, it is meaningless to cache them.
> 
> >   ... Run the command 'sudo make uninstall'.  (If you successfully used
> >   'make install', simply run 'make uninstall'.)  At a minimum, some
> >   directories not particular to groff, like 'bin' and (depending on
> >   configuration) an X11 'app-defaults' directory will remain, as will
> >   one plain file called 'dir', created by GNU Texinfo's 'install-info'
> >   command.  (As of this writing, 'install-info' offers no provision for
> >   removing an effectively empty 'dir' file, and groff does not attempt
> >   to parse this file to determine whether it can be safely removed.)
> >   All other groff artifacts will be deleted from the installation
> >   hierarchy.
> > 
> > Any chance 'install-info' could get savvy as noted above?  (Maybe it
> > already has--I'm running 6.7.0.)
> 
> Why does it make sense to do that?  An "empty" DIR file is not really
> empty: it has instructions at its beginning, which are important for
> newbies.  Also, on well-maintained system, DIR will rarely become
> empty, and if it does, it will soon enough become non-empty again,
> since all the Info manuals installed on the system should be mentioned
> there, and why would we want to imagine a system which has no Info
> manuals at all, not even an Info manual that describes how to use Info
> (which comes with the Texinfo distribution)?

It falls under the same category as the "directories not particular
to groff" mentioned in the instructions.  You want install-info (or
Automake rules) to remove an empty dir file; you could equally claim
that install-info should remove the empty 'info' directory that contains
that dir file.

What are the benefits of removing the file?