[ On Tue, September 22, 1998 at 19:49:07 (-0700), Jonathan Stone wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: texinfo files 
>
> And broken.  From this info user's perspective, anyway.  
> 
> Info can't browse or search outside the node you're
> directory. Splitting the toplevel node based on irrelevant (to info
> users) criteria like whether the info node is from the NetBSD source
> tree or an installed package is ... ghastly.  From an "integration"
> perspective, it really sucks.  (Do you use info?)

Do you use the more modern versions of info?  They have all the features
you desire and more.

As Jim Bernard has correctly pointed out the current version of
officially sanctioned info readers uses a path mechanism similar to
MANPATH (INFOPATH), and they automatically merge all of the available
"dir" files from each path in INFOPATH to present to the user a complete
index of all available documentation within INFOPATH.

> Mind you, not getting the info nodes at all unless you install emacs.

As Ted Lemon noted either emacs, or preferably the GNU texinfo package,
need to be installed in order to build info files from their texinfo
source form.

I'd strongly recommend that texinfo be included in the /usr/src/gnu
collection, especially since the preferred form for all the
documentation for everything else in /usr/src/gnu is texinfo format).
You get a free info reader too:  texinfo comes with the command-line
"info" program.  Not having the ability to process texinfo files and
read the resulting hypertext documents native in the full NetBSD
distribution is a sad deficiency.

GNU texinfo also comes with "install-info" which does what "install"
does, but for info files (i.e. the output of makeinfo), including
automatically inserting/replacing the appropriate entry in the "dir"
file.  Any texinfo documents that don't contain the necessary hints for
install-info can easily be patched.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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