Eli Zaretskii <e...@gnu.org> writes:
> In any case, it makes little sense to me to complicate the
> installation of binaries and their upgrade, and make your PATH longer,
> just to arrive at a solution we can already have -- separating just
> the manuals and having the corresponding directories on INFOPATH.
OK, so I'm not sure I've accurately followed the entire conversation,
but here's what I'm currently contemplating for at least Debian Emacs
and Guile, and I wondered if it seems plausible given the current tools:
- Put all of an Emacs version's info pages in /usr/share/info/emacs-XY
as we do now, but stop trying to mangle the dir entries (or anything
else for that matter).
- Have Emacs continue to add its version-specific info dir
(/usr/share/info/emacs-XY) to the front of the info path so that if
invoked directly, /usr/bin/emacs-XY will prefer its own pages by
default.
- Manage /usr/share/info/emacs.info.gz via Debian's
update-alternatives (with all the other related files as --slave
pages: i.e. emacs.info-*, calc, org, etc.). This should allow the
standalone reader (and anything else) to find the system preferred
info pages by default.
- Document that if you have multiple versions installed, and you want
to read the pages for an alternative that's not the default with the
standalone reader, you can use "info -d /usr/share/info/emacs-XY
...". For Emacs you'd need to prepend to the Info-directory-list.
The main change is the use of update-alternatives which should make the
Debian info arrangement look substantially less unusual. (This approach
does depend on update-alternatives handling sets reasonably whose
--slave link sets differ - which I need to double-check.)
Thanks
--
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org
GPG as of 2011-07-10 E6A9 DA3C C9FD 1FF8 C676 D2C4 C0F0 39E9 ED1B 597A
GPG as of 2002-11-03 14DD 432F AE39 534D B592 F9A0 25C8 D377 8C7E 73A4
