On Sat, Feb 22, 2025 at 07:04:28PM +0000, Gavin Smith wrote: > Rather than build functionality into the "info" program to read data > files listing online locations of Info manuals, or even to download > files from the network (we are not turning Info into a web browser, to > create the "Info web" to rival the WWW, after all), we could provide a > simple "hook" that "info" could use if a manual is not found. > > Users could then install a package *once* to provide this hook for a > particular distribution.
It should probably be installed as a dependency of info readers by distributions packagers. > It could be as simple as printing a message: > > tar not installed; run 'sudo apt install tar doc' to download and install > > The hook script itself would use a list of manual names and which > distribution packages install them. This script would be maintained > separately from the main Texinfo project. There could be different scripts > for different distributions that would handle the vagaries of Info manual > installation on each distribution, without this code having to be in > the main source code for Info. This seems simple and could be enough. Just to be clear, my understanding is that there is a program named, for example, missing-info on all the platforms, that gets a manual name in argument and answers a sentence to be said by Info readers. This program is platform specific and ideally maintained by the platform developers. Did I understand correctly? This looks like a good plan but it relies on platforms developper volunteers and our ability to convince them to do it... Also, this will not help users installing from source or on platforms where there is no package management, but downloading manuals automatically for those cases only is probably not needed, as presumably in those cases the users know what they are doing. -- Pat
