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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 5 Aug 2015 18:09:45 +0100
> From: Gavin Smith <address@hidden>
> Cc: Rob Browning <address@hidden>, address@hidden, 
>       Texinfo <address@hidden>
> 
> > Which is why I think having a feature that would transparently replace
> > "foo" in an Info file name with "foo-1.2.3" would be more convenient.
> > Of course, such replacement should only take place where this kind of
> > redirection is relevant.
> >
> > For the Info reader, this could done as part of the reader itself.
> > For HTML, we could have a small application that would write
> > appropriate redirection files.
> 
> The problem with split Info files isn't important: it's unlikely that
> an Info reader will run out of memory reading a non-split file, so
> simply avoid split files if it causes a problem. If it does become a
> problem there would be ways to deal with it, for example teach
> install-info how to rewrite a subfiles table.

If the file is created as "-o foo-1.2.3.info", there should be no need
to rewrite anything, is there?

And I don't like to have to tell users "if you want to have severeal
versions of the same manual accessible, you must use --no-split", if
that can be avoided.  Such conditions are always an annoyance and a
source of bugs.

> A similar problem is with image files associated with Info files. I
> can't think how that would be supported, but few Info files use images
> anyway.

Why not use the same solution as with references between manuals?

> You suggest having some kind of configuration file defining aliases
> for manuals. A subdirectory full of symbolic links is a kind of such a
> file, and not harder to update than any other kind of file format you
> could devise.

Symlinks are less portable than init files.