bug#31405: 25.3; Python.el doesn't provide infos to info-lookup-symbol

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> IMNSHO, it's a bug in Debian that they include the version in the file
> name and don't provide any symlink or other way of getting the Python
> Info manual.  That's not how the Info system was designed to work.

Yeah, the file is called

python3.9-doc: /usr/share/info/python3.9.info.gz

and there's no symlink.  Python is slightly ... special, I guess, since
there's the constant in-fighting about python2/3, but it's still pretty
odd.

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> If Debian is including the version in the file name, and we want to
> support that, I think we should have a defcustom for users to control
> which version they want Emacs to look for.  Or maybe we should allow a
> list of file names there, and then we could mention all the known
> names for reasonably recent versions of Python.
>
> Again, the Info system is not designed to support that.  For example,
> hyperlinks from other manuals won't work reliably, and you'd have
> trouble with the system-wide DIR file, if you ever dare updating it
> outside of Debian's control.

Yeah, it's far from ideal.  But I think we can try to be helpful in
info-look, at least -- I'll add some further code to try to do a trivial
search in the python3.* name space.  I don't think adding a variable
here should be necessary.  If it turns out that our guesses are wrong,
then the user can do

  (with-eval-after-load 'info-look
    (info-lookup-add-help
     :mode 'python-mode
     :doc-spec '(("(python-some-weird-name)Index"))))

as Basil suggested.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no