Re: (info browser) Should any default directories be used when INFOPATH is set?

[Gavin Smith]

On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 11:11 PM, Karl Berry <address@hidden> wrote:
> Because this behavior has been around so long, I fear that people
> setting INFOPATH now are likely to expect the merging with system
> directories, despite the documentation.  In other words, let's treat it
> as a doc bug and not a code bug.
>
> Therefore, I think we should change the documentation for INFOPATH to
> say that it does do the merging (as well as the "extra colon"
> expansion), and invent a new variable to define the entire info path
> without any additional defaults (no need for colon expansion there, I
> think).  Sound reasonable?
>
> The variable name that comes to mind is INFOPATH_OVERRIDE, not that I'm
> especially thrilled by it :).
>
> ?

There are a few options, none of them particularly nice. INFOPATH
could be adapted so that you could specify in some way that you don't
want the default info directory. Maybe you could specify "NODEFAULT"
as one of the directories (just as you can specify "PATH" as one of
the directories now.) (Not ideal, of course, as this is reducing the
directories to be searched rather than increasing them as always
happens at present.) Or there could be some other syntactical change.
(Like adding a colon at the end: maybe end with two colons, or begin
with a colon. This is no good, I know.)