info, emacs and minfo

[<mcclosk@ling.ucsc.edu>]

In upgrading from slink to frozen a couple of weeks ago, I seem to
have messed up my info system. This is too bad because it's the way I
like best to get at documentation.

I assume that the problems have to do with the shift to the /usr/share
directory structure. Under slink, all the info files were in
/usr/info; now they are split between /usr/info/ and /usr/share/info/

There are 3 different ways on this system to get at the info files:
[1] from within emacs, [2] using Minfo, [3] using tkinfo. Minfo is the
one I like best, but the documentation is slim and there is no
configuration file controlling its behavior (as far as I have been
able to tell).

>From within emacs, I get the error message: `Can't find info
directory'.  Using Minfo, I get a top-level menu, but clicking on any
of the items in the menu yields the error-message `menu item not
found'. Clicking on the `emacs' menu-item crashes the program.

Curiously, things seem to work as they are supposed to with tkinfo,
but I don't use that much and haven't tested it as much the others.

In trying to solve this, I have done the following:

  . run install-info in both directories; both have a dir file
  . defined INFOPATH in /etc/profile as : "/usr/info:/usr/share/info"
 
I suppose I could move all the info files into /usr/share/info, run
install-info again there and have INFOPATH defined only as
/usr/share/info, but I'm worried that that may screw up future
automatic upgrades, and have a suspicion that this kind of thing
should be handled by the upgrade routines, and shouldn't have to be
done by hand.

There seem to be a number of related bug-reports in the archive, but I
haven't seen any suggested fixes or workarounds.  If there are any
info-experts out there who could give some advice, I would be very
grateful,

Jim

PS Is it only me or is the digest-service gone? The archive suggests
that the list was active at least until April 1st, but I stopped
receiving digests several days before that.