Karl Berry <k...@freefriends.org> writes: > Here's what I don't get: suppose there are two versions of Emacs > installed, emacs-x and emacs-y. Presumably Debian (and anyone else) has > some method for the user to choose which one is invoked by just "emacs". > Can't that method, whatever it is, also switch the Info files that are found?
Among other things, I don't think that'd really be feasible on a multi-user system. I don't want to change the docs (and currently the default #! version as well) for everyone on the system just because I want to check out the GCC 5 info pages. At least on Debian the normal method is update-alternatives, which can only be invoked as root, and changes the defaults globally. Taken as a whole that seems awfully heavy handed if all you want to do is read the Guile 2.2 docs while still defaulting to 2.0 in all other ways (i.e. for #!/usr/bin/guile). And even if update-alternatives worked per-user, it would still have to be augmented to accommodate the documentation independently from any "#!/..." links, because I don't want to switch even my per-user default executables just to read newer/older docs. I'm also not sure how you would address the #! links per-user, unless they were required to be of the form "#!/usr/bin/env ..." system-wide, or similar. Perhaps it's naive, but I feel like I might just want a dir like this so that I can find what I want and don't have to change global state and/or restart the viewer just to read different versions: * Emacs 24 ... * Emacs 25 ... * GCC 4.9 ... * GCC 5.0 ... * Python 2.7 ... * Python 3.4 ... Then the internal refs would be appropriately versioned, and the readers would jump to the appropriate version by default. i.e. the Emacs 24 pages would link internally to the emacs24-calc or calc-emacs24 or whatever. Perhaps the various calc versions might percolate up to the top too: * Calc W.X * Calc Y.Z And "info calc" might even just show me that if I wasn't more specific, say via "info calc/W.X". Though at the moment, I don't really care about the details of the interface as long as there's a reasonable way to find the versions I want. > I just don't see how Texinfo can help to solve the > multiple-version-packaging problem. I'd be a bit surprised if in the long run Texinfo doesn't plan to accommodate installing and reading the documentation for multiple major versions. For example, in the GCC world it's certainly reasonable to expect that you might need to work with both 4.9 and 5.0, or with 2.7 and 3.4 in the Python world, etc. FWIW, if I'm reading it right, it looks like the Debian GCC 5 info pages may be using gcc-5 and gccint-5 style refs. 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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
