Re: Info: fresher stuff hidden

[Kevin Rodgers]

Richard Stallman wrote:
>     No, it shouldn't: it's not uncommon for a system to have several DIR
>     files along INFOPATH with identical entries pointing to the same
>     manuals.  It would be a nuisance to see all those identical entries
>     line up in my face.
>
> Well, it could check whether the entries are identical
> and keep only the non-duplicates.

I don't think the completion behavior Dan reported can be changed at the
Info level: the low-level completion functions (e.g. all-completions)
can handle duplicates in the completion list¹, but the minibuffer
completion commands (e.g. completing-read) automatically discard
duplicates; so when Info-menu completes its MENU-ITEM argument, no
duplicates will be presented to the user.

The solution is that the menu items should have different names, e.g.

* Emacs: (emacs-21/emacs).       The extensible self-documenting text 
editor.
* Emacs 22: (emacs-snapshot/emacs). The extensible self-documenting text 
editor.

¹ Unless the completion list is actually a hash table or obarray, which
by definition only contains unique names.

--
Kevin