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

[Gavin Smith]

On 4 August 2015 at 16:39, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
>> 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?

Convenience. People won't want to write an INFOPATH in their .bashrc
or wherever which is dozens of entries long. Also it would save
editing dir files by hand to add versioned entries. Speaking for
myself, I know I would certainly install multiple versions of the
Texinfo manuals, and multiple versions of some other manuals as well,
if it was convenient to do so.

Suppose for example I wanted to have the Texinfo 4.13 manual handy,
then I could build from that release. "make install" would by default
install the Info files under /usr/local/share/info, overriding those
that are already there. I could create a new directory and specify
that as the "infodir" to configure (like
/usr/local/share/info/texinfo-4.13), but then I would have to add that
new directory to INFOPATH and update or restart all of my terminal
sessions. Then accessing the manual still wouldn't be as easy as "info
texinfo-4.13". The only ways I can think of are either "info --all
texinfo" followed by selecting a menu entry, or else give the full
path to the installed Info file, which is too much to type. Really
it's not worth the trouble.

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

Can you elaborate on what would constitute a complete solution?