Re: Debian trouble with Info

[Rob Browning]

Dave Love <address@hidden> writes:

> [I don't understand why Emacs 19 is distributed at all, in contrast to
> ancient versions of other packages.]

We still (at last check) had a fairly large and quite vocal set of
users that would be *very* upset if they had to quit using emacs19, so
if we can keep supporting it, and if it doesn't make us have to do
anything much more complex than what we have to do to support emacs
and xemacs simultaneously, then it seemed like a good idea.

(In fact, as a direct example, I was having dinner with one of RMS's
 older friends (who lives in Austin now) on Wed night, and she seemed
 quite certain that she didn't want to upgrade.)

>  RB> The problem is that I haven't found a solution that would allow
>  RB> that cleanly, so I tried to fix the problem with some "sed"
>  RB> hackery which worked until the most recent release of emacs 20.
> 
> Apart from being a maintenance hassle, this doesn't work properly in
> Emacs or in standalone readers.

Agreed.  I know the current Debian solution is unacceptable, and it's
time to fix it.

> The XEmacs package just uses a subdirectory (of /usr/share/info?) with
> the correct search path and this works fine within XEmacs as far as I
> can tell, and would work in other readers if INFOPATH had the
> appropriate addition globally.

This seems like a potentially good option.

>  RB> Then I could use Debian's alternatives mechanism to make sure
>  RB> that /usr/share/info/emacs-*.gz pointed to
>  RB> /usr/share/info/emacs-{flavor}*.gz, where flavor is one of e19,
>  RB> e20, xe21, etc.
> 
> The emacs... files aren't the only ones at issue, and if you do that,
> you have to maintain the dir file appropriately.  Particularly since
> Debian distributes separate packages for things Gnus and PCL-CVS, it's
> not clear to me how you maintain consistency of cross-references
> between them given different content.

As a I mentioned in a reply I just wrote to Eli, I'd hoped that we
could have it so that a cross-reference to "emacs" always pointed to
the "default" flavor, and in cases where you meant a specific version,
you would mention something like emacs-20 specifically.  If that's not
feasible, then perhaps I'll have to rethink...

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