Re: Playground pager lsp(1)

Gavin Smith
2023-04-07T11:04:06Z

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?