Pondering adjustments to emacsen flavor info handling

[Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org>]

I believe the current info page arrangement is broken, and assuming I
understand the current Emacs and standalone info reader behavior
correctly, I'm pondering these changes:

  - Put all of an emacsen flavor's info pages in
    /usr/share/info/emacs-XY as we do now, but stop trying to mangle the
    dir entries.

  - Have emacsen flavors continue to add their flavor-specific info dir
    to the front of the info path so they'll prefer their own pages by
    default.

  - Manage /usr/share/info/emacs.info.gz via update-alternatives (with
    all the other related files as --slave pages: calc, org, etc.) so
    that the standalone reader (and anything else) will find the info
    pages for the selected alternative by default.

  - Document that if you have multiple emacsen flavors installed, and
    you want to read the pages of an unselected alternative with the
    standalone reader, you can use "info -d /usr/share/info/FLAVOR ...".

The main change is the use of update-alternatives which should make the
Debian info arrangement look substantially more normal than what we have
now (until/unless info adds some kind of better support for multiple
versions).

This approach depends on update-alternatives handling sets reasonably
whose --slave links differ - which I haven't investigated yet.

Thoughts?
-- 
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