Re: Contributing to Emacs Development

[Kai Großjohann]

On Sat, 11 Nov 2000, address@hidden wrote:

> The nasic problem we are trying to address here is trying to
> support multiple versions of programs with different info files
> when the underlying infrastructure, namely, texinfo, is deficient,
> in that it does not procide any versioning suypport either in the
> dir file or in intrer document links.

One way to achieve the desired goal would be for Debian to patch the
*.texi files before building the info files.  The patched *.texi files
should include links to correctly versioned file names, rather than
the generic file names.

This could be made easier by defining a variable in the preamble of
the *.texi file which points to the correct targets, then use that
variable.  Then the standard distribution could use the variable, and
the Debian patch to change the variable value would be trivial.

Of course, this means that someone has to think about the target of
the link.  For example, suppose that in the Emacs info file there is a
link to the Gnus info file which says `Use Gnus for reading news'.
Then we probably want the link to point to the default Gnus version,
rather than the one that comes with Emacs.  But for links between the
Gnus and the Message info files, the version should be retained.

Whee.

I think that the most difficult part of the solution is to decide
where each link should point to.  Then, implementing this decision is
a simple matter.

kai
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