idn: info page is a copy of man page

[era]

This has been a long-standing bug with many package which have documentation in Info format. The manual page directs you to info, but info provides a copy of the same manual page, rather than the full manual.

I'm not sure what the correct resolution should be. I know that the coreutils used to suffer from this, too, but apparently fixed it somehow. Perhaps the longer-term solution would involve fixing the info package somehow.

$ man idn | tail -n 12 | head -n 8
SEE ALSO
       The full documentation for idn is maintained as a Texinfo manual. If
       the info and idn programs are properly installed at your site, the com‐
       mand

              info idn

       should give you access to the complete manual.

$ info idn | tail -n 12 | head -n 8
info: Writing node (*manpages*)idn...
info: Done.
SEE ALSO
       The full documentation for idn is maintained as a Texinfo manual. If
       the info and idn programs are properly installed at your site, the com‐
       mand

              info idn

       should give you access to the complete manual.

$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS
Release: 10.04

$ apt-cache policy idn
idn:
  Installed: 1.15-2
  Candidate: 1.15-2
  Version table:
 *** 1.15-2 0
        500 http://mirrors.nic.funet.fi/ubuntu/ lucid/universe Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[era (era)]

Verified that the problem also exists in 1.23-2 (Ubuntu 12.04 live beta).

There doesn't actually appear to be an info page in the package. I suppose it ought to be included, unless its license is problematic or something (in which case the fix would be to remove the pointer to the documentation from the SEE ALSO section of the manual page).

[era (era)]

For what it's worth, it's probably referring to the libidn info page, which is in package libidn11-dev. It has a section about the command-line idn tool and its invocation options.

IMHO, the easiest fix would be to extract the info documentation into a manual page and remove or reword the SEE ALSO pointer, but this should probably happen upstream.

[Simon Josefsson (simon-josefsson)]

Indeed the manpage is referring to the libidn info manual, which is in the libidn11-dev package. One solution would be to move the info manual to either the 'idn' package or a separate 'libidn-doc' package. There is more documentation that we could ship (like the API manual) so maybe libidn-doc is better? The license of the manual is DFSG-compatible, so there is no problem including it.

/Simon (speaking as upstream and 'libidn' debian package co-maintainer)