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?
