Re: (fwd) Bug#792328: info: can no longer find the Emacs manual

[Gavin Smith]

On 15 July 2015 at 00:23, Norbert Preining <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> down here at Debian a certain inconvenience has arrived: Namely that
> info cannot follow links to info files in sub-directories it seems:
> In our case this is the emacs manual in the emacs-24 subdirectory:
>         /usr/share/info/emacs-24/emacs.info.gz
>
> The respective dir entry looks like
>         * Emacs: (emacs-24/emacs).      The extensible self-documenting text 
> editor.
> but trying to enter into that node gives:
>         emacs-24/emacs: No such file or directory
> The dir-entry was added with
>         install-info /usr/share/info/emacs-24/emacs.info.gz 
> /usr/share/info/dir
> Do we do something wrong here?

I didn't know that this was supposed to work. I saw this usage
somewhere else a few weeks ago and I intended to look at it, so I
guess if it's being done we should support it.

>> "info emacs" and "info emacs-24/emacs" can no longer find the Emacs
>> manual (provided by emacs24-common-non-dfsg).

"info emacs-24/emacs" is now interpreting "emacs-24/emacs" as a path
relative to the current directory, because it has a slash in it. Given
that there is a dir entry for "Emacs" "info emacs" should work once
the other problem is resolved.

It's obviously useful to be able to access documentation for multiple
installed versions of a manual at once. So I'm concerned that without
separate dir entries (like "emacs-24", "emacs-25", "emacs-26"),
running

info emacs-24/emacs
info emacs-25/emacs
info emacs-26/emacs

won't work. I'm not sure if anyone relied on this, but if they did, I
don't know what to suggest, other than use separate dir entries.
Another idea is to make sure all the directories containing Info files
are in INFOPATH, and invoke with "info --all emacs". A possible
solution could be to copy the --program-prefix flag supplied by
Autoconf, which is used for this problem with executable files.