dselect won't config emacs 20.3

[Ted Llewellyn <llewell@interport.net>]

  On a new install of debian 2.0, emacs installs but won't set up.
Several other packages that I really want won't install because emacs
doesn't finish correctly, but emacs itself does start (I don't know if it
works right but it starts and stops normally).
  This box is a P60 with 128M, 1G SCSI, ATI video; it's been running
slackware for a year, so I know the hardware all works correctly.  I'm
installing from an official CD.  I picked packages by task, not by
profile, but this seems to be the only installation failure (I may have
issues with X, but that I will deal with that separately if I can't
resolve it).
  Anyway, the error message from dselect was:

emacs-install: /usr/lib/emacsen-common/packages/install/tm emacs20 
xemacs20 failed at /usr/lib/emacsen-common/emacs-install line 26.

  The only dependency in dselect was emacs-el, which also did not install
correctly, but said that was because emacs wasn't configured.  I turned
off that package and the other ones that failed because of this (auctex
and psgml), and tried installing emacs by itself.  Same failure.
  The offending line in the script and the following lines are:

if test -x /usr/sbin/install-info-altdir; then
    echo install/tm: install Info links for ${FLAVOR}
    install-info-altdir --quiet --section "" "" --dirname=${FLAVOR} /usr/info/tm-en.info.gz
fi

  I don't really know shell scripting so I only have a vague idea of
what's going on here.  Unfortunately, I didn't have time to trace this any
further before I had to go to bed because I just can't do this stuff all
night anymore.
  By the way, xemacs seemed to install just fine.  Can I get auctex and
psgml functionality out of that application?
  Any help much appreciated.


 _ () _-- __()       Ted Llewellyn
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