On Sun, Feb 23, 2025 at 12:31:29PM +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote: > 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.
Yes. > > 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? Yes, it would get the manual name as an argument. I think the script would print the message itself. There are details to be worked out such as what happens when following a cross-reference in an Info file, but I'm sure we could figure something out. I'm starting the code to find and run such a hook. > This looks like a good plan but it relies > on platforms developper volunteers and our ability to convince them to > do it... Yes, you are right here. > 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
