[Fedora-packaging] --excludedocs and packaging guidelines?

[Ville Skyttä]

On Tuesday 11 March 2008, Warren Togami wrote:

> Furthermore I wonder if there should be any rule or suggestion of how
> install-info should be used within a %post scriptlet.  I see some
> packages redirect the output of install-info to /dev/null, and
> install-info's man page also describes a --quiet option.  Might we
> recommend in guidelines the use of this to suppress the warning that
> happens when a package is installed with --excludedocs?

install-info's --quiet does not suppress errors resulting from files not 
found.

Redirecting stderr to /dev/null sounds a bit draconian to me; testing whether 
the info file exists before invoking install-info would be somewhat better.

But the somewhat annoying part of that is that currently we'd need to test if 
the gzipped info file exists which is hardcoding assumptions about what 
happens under the hood outside of the specfile's control into the specfile 
(would break if the system rpm is configured to not compress info files at 
all or use something else than gzip for compressing them) instead of just 
invoking install-info (without the .gz suffix! install-info handles that 
internally) on the target info file.

So I suppose the recommended way would call for a macro, let's say

  %install_info foo

...which would expand into something like (%1=foo):

  for suf in .gz .bz2 "" ; do # + other suffixes auto-handled by install-info
    if [ -f %{_infodir}/%1.info$suf ] ; then
      /sbin/install-info %{_infodir}/$1.info %{_infodir}/dir || :
      break
    fi
  done

...and a similar one that does install-info --delete for removing it.