Re: Bug#793067: Bug#792328: info: can no longer find the Emacs manual

[Gavin Smith]

On 3 August 2015 at 01:40, Rob Browning <address@hidden> wrote:
>   - There's an easy way to ask specifically for the "foo X" pages.  I
>     suppose X might be program specific, but all of the values I can
>     think of right now are of the form N or N.M. (i.e. GCC 5.0, Python
>     2.7, Python 3.4, Emacs 24.4 (or just 24?)), etc.

A good start would to find a way to get "make install" for Automake
build systems to heed the --program-suffix configure option for Info
files. I was concerned that this might not be appropriate, pertaining
only to executable programs, but it transpires that this option takes
effect for at least man pages in addition to programs, so there's no
reason why it wouldn't be desirable behaviour for similar to be done
for Info files.

Suppose you configure with "./configure --program-suffix=-5.2" and
there is an installable Info file "texinfo.info": ideally, the file
would be installed as "texinfo-5.2.info", and be accessible with "info
texinfo-5.2". Moreover, there should be some transformation of the dir
entry from this:

* texindex: (texinfo)Format with tex/texindex.  Sort Texinfo index files.

to this:

* texindex-5.2: (texinfo-5.2)Format with tex/texindex.  Sort Texinfo
index files.

which would be achieved with an extra option to install-info. (Then
"info texindex-5.2" would work.)

Perhaps install-info could also add a symlink from texinfo.info to
texinfo-5.2.info if no file texinfo.info exists already.

I've been looking at how the name transformation is done in some
Automake-generated makefiles, and I haven't come up with an idiomatic
way to change the makefile behaviour to do this. I'll think about it a
bit more, but we might need changes to Automake, which would be a
downside because we'd need a new release of Automake to happen and for
that to be the release that people use, which would take time.

I'm wondering if we can kill two birds with one stone here and get
install-info to actually install the Info file as part of the
solution.