[ In summary of what's below, I'm asking asking if there's upstream interest in trying to get info pages to handle the installation of multiple versions of a given program gracefully. ]
I hope I have the right list, and I hope this hasn't already been discussed to death. If either is false, just let me know. Debian/GNU tries to arrange things so that when useful, people can have more than one version of a given program installed at the same time. For example, we allow you to install xemacs21, emacs20, and emacs21 all at the same time, and we support installing a separate gnus package (with the latest gnus) alongside all of these [1]. Generally we support direct invocation of a given version of a program via something like "/usr/bin/emacs21" and invocation the system default (administrator adjustable) version via "/usr/bin/emacs", the latter of which is controlled by Debian's update-alternatives mechanism. update-alternatives also controls which manpages are associated with "man emacs" in this case. So far we've successfully resolved essentially all the details involved in allowing multiple-versions to coexist, save one: the handling of info pages -- and accordingly there are a whole raft of bugs, some *very* old, filed against the various emacsen, emacsen-common, gnus, etc. all concerned with the accessibility of the info pages. Though we've tried to figure out ways we could handle this locally, it seems like without upstream support, we're not likely to have a very clean solution. So has any thought been given to this issue, and is this even something you'd be interested in trying to address? It seems like fixing this might require, at least, some enhancements to the various info browsers, and to the semantics and syntax of cross-references, though perhaps there's already some way we can handle this that we haven't thought of yet... In any case, here's one of the bugs discussing the issue. <http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=130653&repeatmerged=yes> See the end of the log for a part of the solution we've considered. Manoj, in particular has thought quite a bit about this. Thanks [1] I'm also planning to add support for multiple versions of guile soon. -- Rob Browning rlb @defaultvalue.org, @linuxdevel.com, and @debian.org Previously @cs.utexas.edu GPG=1C58 8B2C FB5E 3F64 EA5C 64AE 78FE E5FE F0CB A0AD
