2012/12/30 James Cloos <cloos at jhcloos.com>
> >>>>> "SF" == Stefano Ferri <ferriste at gmail.com> writes:
>
> SF> do you mean some compression formats work for describe and some
> SF> other not?
>
> Yes. Gentoo's package manager compresses man and info pages by default,
> using bzip2(1) as its default compressor. And that Just Works? with
> maxima.
>
I don't think it's a matter of different compression algorithms handled or
not by describe(). The problem seems located in the ebuild:
http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/sci-mathematics/maxima/maxima-5.29.1.ebuild
The following function
pkg_preinst() {
# some lisps do not read compress info files (bug #176411)
local infofile
for infofile in "${ED}"/usr/share/info/*.bz2 ; do
bunzip2 "${infofile}"
done
}
correctly says not to compress info files, but if you or your distribution
are using the xz format as default, the script is not able to decompress
info files. I am not a Gentoo user and I don't know its tools, but since
you are saying that now xs is being used, that funcion is going to do
nothing. Try to replace the bz2 and bunzip2 in the for loop with proper xz
commands and see if it works. If so, it is a bug to be reported.
Moreover, looking at https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=176411 , I see
that there is an option to set in the /etc/make.conf file, called
PORTAGE_COMPRESS. Try setting that to bz2 or xz and see the differences, if
any. But I repeat, I don't know much about Gentoo, just guessing... I would
say pkg_preinst() should take care of the PORTAGE_COMPRESS flag.
Stefano