Re: Debian trouble with Info

[Rob Browning]

Gerd Moellmann <address@hidden> writes:

> From Emacs' point of view, these users are not very helpful.  I
> think we shouldn't jump through hoops to support it.

I can certainly see that, but I guess we (Debian vs Emacs) have two
different goals.  Yours is to provide the best possible FSF Emacs, and
I'm all in favor of that goal :>

But Debian's is to provide the best possible, most flexible free
computing platform, including the OS and all of the software for both
single and multi-user machines.  That means allowing both emacs and
xemacs to coexist peacefully, even though I myself have never (I
think) even run xemacs.

So I suppose there are going to be points on which we'll have
different emphases.  Hopefully we can figure out solutions that make
both of us happy.

That said.  At some point we probably will need to drop support for
emacs-19, but that will still leave us with the same issue of
supporting multiple flavors of emacsen.

Also, I'm not sure that any of this needs (or deserves) upstream
accomodations, but I wanted to discuss the issue to see if anyone had
suggestions that I hadn't thought of before I tried to resolve the
issue.  The "info search path" approach sounds like it's worth
investigating.  There would be a default, but the user could override
it if they wanted a particular flavor.  I'll have to investigate.
ISTR that last time I investigated that approach, there was no way to
tell info to just prepend/append a particular item to the search path,
you could only override it wholesale, and that's not particularly
appealing since it requires the user that want's to override to keep
track of the system's default infopath across upgrades...

Thanks, and hope I'm helping more than hurting.
-- 
Rob Browning <address@hidden> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930