Re: Debian trouble with Info

[Rob Browning]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

> I actually wonder why the renaming was required, since the Emacs
> Info files reside in a directory that is specific to the Emacs
> version with which they came.  So, even if Debian users want to work
> with several different Emacs versions, it should be possible to set
> up the Info directory search list as appropriate for each version,
> during startup.

Actually AFAIK, the emacs info files have always just lived in the
flat info dir (/usr/share/info or whatever).  The problem here, is
that on a Debian system, we want you to be able to install as many
flavors of emacs as you like: emacs19, emacs20, xemacs21, etc., and we
also want you to be able to get to the info files for each.

The problem is that I haven't found a solution that would allow that
cleanly, so I tried to fix the problem with some "sed" hackery which
worked until the most recent release of emacs 20.  What I'd like is to
be able to tell makeinfo to use a specific "basename", in this case
emacs-e20 instead of just emacs.  This would affect both the generated
file names and the internal crosslinks.  Then I could use Debian's
alternatives mechanism to make sure that /usr/share/info/emacs-*.gz
pointed to /usr/share/info/emacs-{flavor}*.gz, where flavor is one of
e19, e20, xe21, etc.  This solution would also make sure that both
emacs and the standalone info browser worked properly...

However, I'd be equally happy with any functionally equivalent
solution.

Thanks

-- 
Rob Browning <address@hidden> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930