Re: Debian trouble with Info

[Dave Love]

>>>>> "RB" == Rob Browning <address@hidden> writes:

 RB> that on a Debian system, we want you to be able to install as many
 RB> flavors of emacs as you like: emacs19, emacs20, xemacs21, etc., 

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

 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.

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.

 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.