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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 4 Aug 2015 15:16:45 +0100
> From: Gavin Smith <address@hidden>
> Cc: Rob Browning <address@hidden>, address@hidden, 
>       Texinfo <address@hidden>
> 
> 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.

Users can already have that, by placing each version in its own
directory and adding that directory to INFOPATH.  How is this better
or even significantly different?

> 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).

It might be the desired behavior, but then it might not.  It's
confusing to get a manual other than the one the author of the
cross-reference intended.  It could even fail, if the cross-referenced
node doesn't exist in one of the versions.

I don't think we should promote a semi-broken solution to this
problem.  I think we should look for a complete solution.