Re: info DIR file: Duplicate topic entries problem

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2007 18:58:08 +0530
> From: dhruva <dhruvakm@gmail.com>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> On 6/23/07, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> > > for all topics. The next time I update and build, I see a second entry
> > > for almost all the topics (except "Emacs Lisp Introduction"). It is
> > > not a case of blind appending, something else must be broken in the
> > > "make info" which updates the DIR file.
> >
> > Do you mean that the `info/dir' _file_ gets modified to include
> > duplicate entries?  Or do you mean that looking at the (dir) _node_
> > after typing "C-h i" in Emacs, you see duplicate menu items?
> >
> 
> The info/dir file does not have duplicate entries.

Well, your text above, viz:

  something else must be broken in the "make info" which updates the DIR file.

did suggest that the _file_ DIR has duplicate copies.  Thus my
question.

> But, I do see
> duplicate menu entries on "C-h i" in emacs. I could fix this by
> renaming the folder in which I had build emacs. This makes me believe
> that emacs has taken the build directory as the part of the info path
> list

Yes, that's true.

> The list var "Info-default-directory-list" has the following value

You are looking at the wrong variable.  The correct one is
Info-directory-list.  See the functions info-initialize and
Info-default-dirs which compute its value at startup.

I'm not sure that it's a Bad Thing that the build directory is first
in Info-default-dirs.  Emacs always prefers the Info files that came
with the specific version you built, for the case that you experiment
in the build directory without uninstalling the officially installed
one.

The code in Info-default-dirs does not do on Windows exactly what it
does on GNU/Linux, but that's for a good reason: Windows binaries are
very likely to run on a system other than the one where they were
built, and the code that sets up Info-directory-list should DTRT in
that case.  You are welcome to suggest changes that avoid duplicate
entries in the DIR node, but please make sure the modified code does
not break the use case where the binaries are installed in an
arbitrary directory with no sources or build directory anywhere in
sight.

> ("c:/emacs/info/" "/usr/local/share/info/" "/usr/local/info/"
> "/usr/local/gnu/info/" "/usr/local/gnu/lib/info/"
> "/usr/local/gnu/lib/emacs/info/" "/usr/local/emacs/info/"
> "/usr/local/lib/info/" "/usr/local/lib/emacs/info/" "/gnu/info/"
> "e:/GNU/emacs/info/")
> 
> The last entry is the location I have installed emacs (e:/gnu/emacs).
> IMHO, the other directories are redundant. Based on the OS, could we
> have a smaller set or could this be decided based on the existence of
> the folder?

We already do that, see info-initialize.  That's why
Info-directory-list doesn't include the non-existing directories.