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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 4 Aug 2015 21:20:47 +0100
> From: Gavin Smith <address@hidden>
> Cc: Rob Browning <address@hidden>, address@hidden, 
>       Texinfo <address@hidden>
> 
> > 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".
> 
> This could be done with a directory full of symlinks in the user's
> home directory. For example, from ~/local/info/indirect/foo.info to
> /usr/local/share/info/foo-1.2.3.info. ~/local/info/indirect would be
> early in INFOPATH and references to the "foo" manual would be resolved
> appropriately. Split Info files complicate the situation: either all
> the subfiles would need to be symlinked, or the browser would have to
> be able to find the containing directory of the target of the symlink.
> (Avoiding split Info files in such circumstances would be the simplest
> solution.)

Yes, this is possible, but hardly convenient, for the reasons you
point out.

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.