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

[Gavin Smith]

On 15 July 2015 at 15:06, Norbert Preining <address@hidden> wrote:
> I was a bit surprised to see this, it is rather new, but several
> packages are taking this approach.
>
>> "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
>
> SO I thought.
>
>> 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
>
> What about encoding sub-dirs in the dir file with'::' like:
>         * Emacs: (emacs-24::emacs).      The extensible self-documenting text 
> editor.
>
> Then one could do
>         info emacs-24::emacs
> etc?

I don't like this idea, it just feels too complicated.

It will be possible to get

* Emacs24: (emacs-24/emacs).      The extensible self-documenting text editor.

to work (so run "info Emacs24" or "info emacs24"), but not "info
emacs-24/emacs".

If people have multiple versions of a program installed, how are they
invoking them?

Say "/usr/local/bin" is in PATH and there is a file
"/usr/local/bin/emacs-24/emacs", then running "emacs-24/emacs" doesn't
work, so it's not unexpected for "info emacs-24/info" not to work
either.

It would be likely that they'd be installing the executables as
something like "/usr/local/bin/emacs24", which they could invoke with
"emacs24", in which case it would make sense to be able to get at the
manual with "info emacs24". Is that a possible solution?

If it's not easy to invoke the program, then there's no harm in making
the Info file hard to find as well.