Re: arevert-xtra.texi xref gremlin

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Romain Francoise <romain@orebokech.com>
>> Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2007 11:48:17 +0200
>> 
>> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>> 
>> > They already did: at least one Debian user told me in some forum
>> > (I think gnu.emacs.help) that "C-h F" and "C-h K" didn't work
>> > because the manuals were not there.
>> 
>> C-h F and C-h K are new in Emacs 22
>
> Yes.  The person who told me that used the v21.x equivalents "C-h C-f"
> and "C-h C-k".  This doesn't change the essence of the problem, which
> is that Emacs 21 was shipped without documentation.

I think it was just because they fscked up when sorting things into
directories.  IIRC, the files were there, just not found.

>> and the Emacs 22 package in Debian (emacs-snapshot) ships all the
>> manuals (for the time being).
>
> If they did that once, and on purpose, they can do it again.

The maintainer of emacs-snapshot has already stated that he will no
longer update this package since he is not willing to rip out the
documentation and thus does not feel he can follow Debian policies
here.

Apart from the licensing issue, Emacs is one of the most thoroughly
ruined packages by Debian.  No Emacs and XEmacs developers understand
what Debian does, neither does Emacs/XEmacs itself
(list-load-path-shadows comes up with hundreds of entries), few people
see capable of creating an Elisp package for the system.

The purported advantage is that one needs only one Elisp package for
all flavors of Emacs (emacs21, emacs22, XEmacs) and can install things
in parallel.

There is also a half-baked solution for keeping the documentation in
parallel, and it leads to many manual links not working.

In short: Emacs/XEmacs under Debian are mostly broken, including the
documentation.

Removing the documentation does not make them much more broken.

-- 
David Kastrup