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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 15 Jul 2015 12:14:41 +0100
> From: Gavin Smith <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden, Vincent Lefevre <address@hidden>,
>       Texinfo <address@hidden>
> 
> > 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.

IMO, that Debian trick was fragile to begin with, so I'm not surprised
it finally broke.  It used to work "by sheer luck", AFAIR.

> "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.

How about a new option to the Info reader, whose meaning would be "use
the argument as a menu entry even if it looks like a file name"?