Re: Debian trouble with Info

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Sun, 5 Nov 2000, Richard Stallman wrote:

> The Debian packager for Emacs 20 is address@hidden
> How about discussing this issue with him?

Here's the description of the problem I initially posted to the Emacs 
development list.  I found the problem while working on 
fencepost.gnu.org, where "uname -a" reports:

  Linux fencepost 2.2.17 #1 SMP Sat Sep 23 22:28:11 EDT 2000 i686 unknown

and Emacs says:

  GNU Emacs 20.7.2 (i386-debian-linux-gnu, X toolkit)
  of Tue Jul 25 2000 on raven

The problem is that the Info file for Emacs is renamed; the one I get
when I type "C-h i m emacs RET" is called `emacs-e20'.  This breaks some
of the Info features which look for fixed file names; the specific feature 
that didn't work for me is "C-h C-f".  Other features which might break 
are @xref's that refer to other manuals, :link cookies in defcustom's, 
etc.

The question with which I started this thread was how to solve this.

One suggestion was to have a modifiable alist where each canonical file 
name could have aliases, and which Emacs would consult when it looks for 
Info files.  However, this solution won't easily work with other Info 
readers, including the stand-alone Info program from the Texinfo package, 
unless the list of possible aliases is fixed.

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.

(I remember some discussion on the Texinfo list about a year ago, but I 
don't recall whether any solutions came out of that.)

Could you please tell what is the latest say-so on this issue as far as 
Debian system packaging is concerned?

Thanks.