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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 4 Aug 2015 19:51:23 +0100
> From: Gavin Smith <address@hidden>
> Cc: Rob Browning <address@hidden>, address@hidden, 
>       Texinfo <address@hidden>
> 
> 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.

How's that different from making PATH dozens of entries long,
something you (implicitly) suggested elsewhere in this thread?

> Also it would save editing dir files by hand to add versioned
> entries.

I don't see why that would be needed.  If they really want to say
"info -f foo-1.2.3" instead of "info -f /usr/share/info/foo-1.2.3",
they can make a symlink in a directory under their HOME and place that
directory on INFOPATH.

> 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.

I have dozens of different versions of several manuals on my system,
but never needed anything beyond "info -f /path/to/info/file".

> > 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?

A solution that supports inter-manual links, both in Info and in HTML
formats.  To do this on a per-user basis, we would need some
environment variable or/and user init file that would tell the Info
reader what version of which manual it should look for, so that it
could automagically substitute a reference to a "foo" manual with
"foo-1.2.3".