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

[Gavin Smith]

On 3 August 2015 at 16:21, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> I don't see how this would solve the issue at hand.  Installation of a
> manual is a system-wide action, whereas Rob wanted a way for a _user_
> to specify her preferred version(s) of the manual(s) to use at any
> given moment.

How the user accesses manuals of course depends on how the manuals
were installed.

My suggestion to have some renaming of Info files and transformation
of dir entries would allow the user to access the manual they want by
invoking Info appropriately.

Where my suggestion fails is inter-manual references. A reference to
(gcc) wouldn't find a file called "gcc-4.1.info.gz". (gcc) would go to
a file called "gcc.info" or similar. It would still be better than
what we have at the moment, though.

My idea at the moment is to have a subdirectory of infodir, for
example, /usr/share/info/gcc, in which would occur versioned Info
files, like /usr/share/info/gcc/4.1.info.gz. This way they could still
be found via the manual name "gcc", which matches the directory name.

A related problem is handling translations of manuals, they could go
in the same directory. I'm not sure of the details: I'm mentioning
this to reduce the chance of missing a solution that could solve this
problem as well.

This is subtly different to the suggestion to use subdirectories like
/usr/share/info/emacs23, /usr/share/info/emacs24. In that case those
subdirectories would actually be in INFOPATH, and could contain their
own "dir" file. This would only be used for systems like Emacs with
lots of manuals that all reference each other.

As I remember saying before, I don't think we need to be any more
sophisticated than what the shell does when it is trying to find an
executable program. Suppose you have multiple versions of emacs. The
following doesn't happen:

$ emacs
It appears that you have multiple versions of Emacs installed!  Please
select one of the following options:
[1] Run Emacs 23.1
[2] Run Emacs 23.2
[3] Quit
Enter your choice here:

That doesn't happen, and nobody seems to miss it. If the shell can
avoid a lot of complexity handling multiple versions of programs, I
suspect it may not be necessary for documentation either.