[gentoo-dev] sys-apps/texinfo vs @system

[Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org>]

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the new texinfo-5.x series has rewritten makeinfo in perl.  the main `info` 
program is still in pure C.

when it comes to packages installing .info pages, it's largely limited to the 
GNU projects as the format has never really caught on.  many of those projects 
also install man pages.

personally, i've never found info pages usable.  for most utils, the man pages 
or the --help output is sufficient, and for people doing heavy development, the 
online html manuals are significantly more useful.

when it was pure C, i could live with it as it's only <1MiB and no real deps 
to speak of.  now it's more like 3MiB, and pulls in 3 semi-uncommon additional 
perl packages (not to mention perl itself).

it's in @system for two reasons: it provides `info` and `makeinfo`.  the 
former is for reading info pages (i.e. RDEPEND) while the latter is used for 
generating info pages (i.e. DEPEND) when the tarball didn't ship with them 
pregenerated (they usually do).

one option would be to make the makeinfo stuff into a USE flag so all the perl 
junk isn't pulled in by default.  only the packages that actually generate 
info pages can DEPEND on that.

it'd be simpler if we just dropped it altogether from @system.  if people want 
`info`, they can `emerge` it themselves.  if packages want `makeinfo`, they 
can DEPEND on it -- few fall into this category (<100 by a rough survey of 
random Gentoo installs).

obviously my preference is for the latter.
-mike

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