Re: Debian trouble with Info

[Eli Zaretskii]

On 6 Nov 2000, Rob Browning wrote:

> 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.

How does this work in practice, i.e., what tricks does the user need
to pull to get the Info file of a specific Emacs version?  You don't
mean "C-u C-h i" and/or "info -f", do you?

Also, does that (whatever it is) work for both Emacs and the
stand-alone Info reader?

> 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.

That won't solve the problem of references from other manuals.

And what do you do when you have a single manual of a package FOO
which refers to the Emacs manual, and you have emacs-e19 and emacs-e20
installed?  Where do you want Info to go, and how should Info know
where you want it to go?

> 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.

What is that alternative mechanism?  How does it work?