Re: master ec9523a: Add a keybinding to the help menu to display manuals

[Stephen Berman]

On Thu, 15 Oct 2020 10:43:44 +0300 Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> On October 15, 2020 10:00:12 AM GMT+03:00, Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> 
> wrote:
>> Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
>> 
>> >> files under info/ end in ".info".  Are there known cases of
>> >> extensionless info files that do not correspond to a file ending in
>> >> ".info" or ".info.gz" (or another compression suffix)?  If not,
>> then
>> >> removing that bit of the code will prevent the current false
>> positives.
>> >
>> > It used to be common to have Info files with names like `foo`,
>> `foo-1`,
>> > `foo-2`, ...  Splitting Info files has gotten out of fashion due to
>> the
>> > growing size of RAM, and the use of a `.info` extension has grown
>> > a lot too.  Maybe we could start assuming that all those files
>> nowadays
>> > have a `.info` extension?
>> 
>> I had a look in
>> 
>> /usr/share/info/
>> 
>> here, and it looks like they all have .info in their names.
>
> I have in my /usr/share/info gobs of old Info files without any extension.  So
> please let's not make any changes that would exclude them from completion by
> this command.
>
> If someone has files in Info-related directories that are not Info files, they
> should get their act together.  And if we do that on ELPA, let's get our act
> together, instead of making breaking changes like that.

According to (info "(elisp) Multi-file Packages"), it seems that the
package library currently does not support a separate info directory
within the package directory:

  "If the content directory contains a file named ‘dir’, this is assumed
  to be an Info directory file made with ‘install-info’.  *Note Invoking
  install-info: (texinfo)Invoking install-info.  The relevant Info files
  should also be present in the content directory.  In this case, Emacs
  will automatically add the content directory to ‘Info-directory-list’
  when the package is activated."

I haven't looked at the code so I don't know how feasible it is for ELPA
to accommodate a separate info directory.

Steve Berman