INFOPATH never respected

[Andrew J Spano]

Hello,

I am using Ubuntu 12.10, unfortunately the Debian texinfo package does  
not contain the info pages for such crucial utilities as tar, make, or  
bash. To solve this problem I have downloaded some of the info pages  
that I need, but while I can view the info pages by calling info  
directly on the correct file, I can not open the page with a simple  
"info bash" command nor can I add the info page into the top level  
info index.

I tried setting the INFOPATH variable in my bashrc

export INFOPATH=$INFOPATH:"/home/andrew/info"


However, this does not work, I do not know if the usage of the  
INFOPATH variable has been deprecated, but its value is simply not  
respected by the info program itself. Online documentation seems to  
indicate that this is the appropriate way to manually add info  
documents. I hope to discover a solution.

Thank you,
Andrew.