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

[Gavin Smith]

On 4 August 2015 at 14:34, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
>> It would still be better than what we have at the moment, though.
>
> In what way would it be better?  I don't see any significant
> improvement, just the added complexity.

You could easily install and access multiple versions of manuals
side-by-side, by configuring with --program-suffix. Taking the example
of Texinfo, you could access different versions of the Texinfo manual
with "info texinfo-5.0", "info texinfo-4.13", etc. What would fail
would be cross-references to, for example, "info-stnd": if the current
file was texinfo-5.0.info, this wouldn't necessarily give you
"info-stnd-5.0.info", but whatever "info-stnd.info" was. In the case
of the Texinfo manuals, I don't think that's a huge inconvenience, and
in fact might be the desired behaviour (as "info-stnd.info" would
likely be the file describing the version of "info" that the shell
would find).

> The equivalent works with, say, GCC, because GCC has all of its
> auxiliary programs and files in a versioned directory, whose name is
> dynamically computed by GCC given its own version that is hard-coded
> into the binary, so the only file that needs to be renamed is the GCC
> executable itself.  But this has its limits: e.g., if I have more than
> one version of Binutils installed, GCC will always invoke the 'ld'
> executable it finds first on PATH, not some 'ld-X.Y.Z' that I happen
> to want to use.

If there are many auxiliary programs associated with GCC which have
their own manuals, a solution similar to that suggested for Emacs is
indicated: have a separate infodir for the GCC manuals (likely
/usr/share/info/gcc-VERSION), and make sure it is on INFOPATH.

There should be an option to the Info reader to either prefer the
current infodir, or to search through INFOPATH in the regular order.
Either could be the desired behaviour. Using the regular order would
be desirable when the user was looking for the manual for the first
command in the shell's PATH.

> IOW, the equivalent of the problem of inter-manual references exists
> in shell commands as well, and is not solved well there, either.