info files

info files

[Dan Bensen]

There are tons of .info.gz files in /usr/info, but Emacs info doesn't 
seem to see them.  When I type M-x info, this appears in the window:

Emacs
* Info: (info).		How to use the documentation browsing system.
* Emacs: (emacs).	The extensible self-documenting text editor.
* Emacs FAQ: (efaq).	Frequently Asked Questions about Emacs.

etc.  But nothing from /usr/info.  How do you access those files?

Re: info files

[Sam Peterson]

>>>>> "Dan" == Dan Bensen <randomgeek@cyberspace.net> writes:

    > There are tons of .info.gz files in /usr/info, but Emacs info
    > doesn't seem to see them.  When I type M-x info, this appears in
    > the window:

    > Emacs * Info: (info).  How to use the documentation browsing
    > system.  * Emacs: (emacs). The extensible self-documenting text
    > editor.  * Emacs FAQ: (efaq). Frequently Asked Questions about
    > Emacs.

    > etc.  But nothing from /usr/info.  How do you access those
    > files?

The dir file has to have entries pointing to 'em.  You need to use the
install-info command for this.  sudo install-info <filename> <dir
file> is the typical incantation on Unix systems.

There may be a way to point info directly at a file path, it's not
something I know how to do off the top of my head right now.

-- 
Sam Peterson
skpeterson At nospam ucdavis.edu
"if programmers were paid to remove code instead of adding it,
software would be much better" -- unknown

Re: info files

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 30.10.2006 um 05:17 schrieb Dan Bensen:

> There are tons of .info.gz files in /usr/info, but Emacs info  
> doesn't seem to see them.

When you are in *info* and type C-x d (to enter dired mode): where  
are you? If you're outside of /usr/info (presumingly in /usr/local/ 
info), then you'll need to add /usr/info to the environment variable  
INFOPATH. Or you set an INFOPATH environment variable in some init  
file (site-start.el, .emacs) ...

Check also that a ``dir´´ file exists that contains descriptions of  
all info.gz files!

--
Greetings

   Pete

This is a signature virus.  Add me to your signature and help me to live

Re: info files

[Dan Bensen]

Sam Peterson wrote:
> The dir file has to have entries pointing to 'em.  You need to use the
> install-info command for this.  sudo install-info <filename> <dir
> file> is the typical incantation on Unix systems.

I don't seem to have it.

root[ocaml]# which install-info
which: no install-info in 
(/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin)

Re: info files

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 31.10.2006 um 05:34 schrieb Dan Bensen:

> I don't seem to have it.
>
> root[ocaml]# which install-info
> which: no install-info in (/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/ 
> usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin)

So you need to install the GNU texinfo package: http://www.gnu.org/ 
software/texinfo/.

--
Greetings

   Pete

Ich bin dafür, die Dinge soweit wie möglich zu vereinfachen.
Aber nicht weiter.         - Albert Einstein

Re: info files

[rthorpe]

Dan Bensen wrote:
> Sam Peterson wrote:
> > The dir file has to have entries pointing to 'em.  You need to use the
> > install-info command for this.  sudo install-info <filename> <dir
> > file> is the typical incantation on Unix systems.
>
> I don't seem to have it.
>
> root[ocaml]# which install-info
> which: no install-info in
> (/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin)

As well as getting the TexInfo package from somewhere you might want to
check your system is OK.  Mostly install-info is part of the base
install of a GNU/Linux distro since it's often automatically triggered
after installation of a package to update the dir file.

Re: info files

[Dan Bensen]

rthorpe@realworldtech.com wrote:
> As well as getting the TexInfo package from somewhere you might want to
> check your system is OK.
This is a fresh install of Zenwalk, which used to be Minislack.  The CD 
was current as of this past summer.

Re: info files

[Dan Bensen]

Peter Dyballa wrote:
> So you need to install the GNU texinfo package: 
> http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/.
Oh.  I thought Emacs had an info reader built into it.  Thanks.

Re: info files

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 31.10.2006 um 16:47 schrieb Dan Bensen:

> Peter Dyballa wrote:
>> So you need to install the GNU texinfo package: http://www.gnu.org/ 
>> software/texinfo/.
> Oh.  I thought Emacs had an info reader built into it.  Thanks.

The info files reader is built-in, but not the software to set up the  
info files system, particularly the automatic creator of entries in  
the dir files. Again, GNU Emacs has also the ability to interpret the  
dir files ...

--
Greetings

   Pete

"Computers are good at following instructions,
but not at reading your mind."
D. E. Knuth, The TeXbook, Addison-Wesley 1984, 1986, 1996, p. 9

Re: info files

[Robert Thorpe]

Dan Bensen wrote:
> rthorpe@realworldtech.com wrote:
> > As well as getting the TexInfo package from somewhere you might want to
> > check your system is OK.
> This is a fresh install of Zenwalk, which used to be Minislack.  The CD
> was current as of this past summer.

I see.  People from the corner of the world near Slackware tend to like
"minimalism" as a result they tend not to use Emacs and so tend not to
support it well.  Possibly none of the developers have ever noticed
that the manuals don't come up properly because they don't use Emacs or
info.  (Understand this isn't a direct allegation against Zenwalk, it's
just been something I've noticed in other Slackware derivatives).

Slackware itself supports Emacs reasonably though.

Re: info files

[Dan Bensen]

Robert Thorpe wrote:
> I see.  People from the corner of the world near Slackware tend to like
> "minimalism" as a result they tend not to use Emacs

Really?  I thought Slackers were the smartest Linux hackers so they 
would use the smartest editor.  :)

> info.  (Understand this isn't a direct allegation against Zenwalk, it's
> just been something I've noticed in other Slackware derivatives).
> Slackware itself supports Emacs reasonably though.

I'm not entirely happy with ZW, so I may try Slack.  Minimalism in ZW 
includes a lack of install options, lots of missing fonts, no texinfo, 
nonfunctioning sound, and not the greatest online support in the world. 
  Oh, well.  At 400MB, it's a convenient download.

Re: info files

[David Combs]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1663 bytes --]

In article <mailman.430.1162212279.27805.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>,
Peter Dyballa  <Peter_Dyballa@Web.DE> wrote:
>
>Am 30.10.2006 um 05:17 schrieb Dan Bensen:
>
>> There are tons of .info.gz files in /usr/info, but Emacs info  
>> doesn't seem to see them.
>
>When you are in *info* and type C-x d (to enter dired mode): where  
>are you? If you're outside of /usr/info (presumingly in /usr/local/ 
>info), then you'll need to add /usr/info to the environment variable  
>INFOPATH. Or you set an INFOPATH environment variable in some init  
>file (site-start.el, .emacs) ...
>
>Check also that a ``dir´´ file exists that contains descriptions of  
>all info.gz files!

Is what you're talking about refer especially to linux?

Because I have no $INFOPATH, nor any dir44 files, yet info seems to work ok.

Maybe because I myself downloaded and compiled (gnu) emacs, on my
sunblade-100 solaris-9 system?

And, by hand I made 

Info-default-directory-list's value is 
("/big7/from_netcom-dir4/sources2-stuff/cvs-emacs--6apr05/info/" "/opt/csw/info/" "/opt/sfw/info/" "/usr/local/info/" "/ROOT-FOR--me-FIRST-in-PATH-tree/info" "/big5/david3/from_netcom-dir1/emacs-stuff/elisp-manual-21-2.8/" "/david3/from_netcom-dir2/perl-stuff/perl-info.5.004/info/" "/myexternals/opt/gnu/diffutils-2.7/info/" "/big5/david3/from_netcom-dir1/emacs-stuff/emacs-lisp-intro-2.04/" "/opt/sfw/lib/xemacs-21.1.14/info/" "/opt/csw/info/" "/usr/local/info/" "/usr/local/share/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/")



Puzzled about INFOPATH and dir44-files.

David

Re: info files

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: dkcombs@panix.com (David Combs)
> Date: Sun, 19 Nov 2006 22:25:47 +0000 (UTC)
> 
> Is what you're talking about refer especially to linux?

No.

> Because I have no $INFOPATH, nor any dir44 files, yet info seems to work ok.

When INFOPATH is not set, Emacs looks in a list of standard
directories, including the one where you installed Emacs.

I don't know about dir44, since I can find no references to such a
file in this thread.

Re: info files

[Robert Thorpe]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > From: dkcombs@panix.com (David Combs)
> > Date: Sun, 19 Nov 2006 22:25:47 +0000 (UTC)
> >
> > Is what you're talking about refer especially to linux?
...
> I don't know about dir44, since I can find no references to such a
> file in this thread.

I think some newsreader has had a problem with character sets here.  To
Dave Combs: They are dir files if Info works on your system then you
have one, or more.

info files

[Stephen Berman]

Recent bzr updates of the branch I use for regular builds always ended
with a conflict about info/ not being empty and therefore not deleted
(it was of course absent in my trunk mirror).  So I deleted it from the
branch manually, did `bzr resolve --all', and that eliminated the
conflict.  But now when I run make, no info files are built.  They are
built by running `make info', which creates info/ in the source
directory and populates it.  So I suppose the next time I update the
branch I'll get a conflict again and have to delete info/ manually, and
then run `make info' on the next build; and so on.  This doesn't seem
very sensible, so I guess I'm missing something, but I saw nothing in
NEWS.  So what am I missing?  In case it's relevant, I build Emacs out
of tree and do not install it.

Steve Berman

Re: info files

[Andreas Schwab]

Stephen Berman <stephen.berman@gmx.net> writes:

> So I suppose the next time I update the branch I'll get a conflict
> again

No, you won't.  It's now an ignored directory.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, schwab@linux-m68k.org
GPG Key fingerprint = 58CA 54C7 6D53 942B 1756  01D3 44D5 214B 8276 4ED5
"And now for something completely different."

Re: info files

[Stephen Berman]

On Mon, 23 Dec 2013 18:10:53 +0100 Andreas Schwab <schwab@linux-m68k.org> wrote:

> Stephen Berman <stephen.berman@gmx.net> writes:
>
>> So I suppose the next time I update the branch I'll get a conflict
>> again
>
> No, you won't.  It's now an ignored directory.

Ah, ok; thanks.  (I guess it would have been more polite to just wait
till I could update again, then I would have seen no conflict, but
thanks for indulging my impatience.)

Steve Berman

info files

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Stephen Berman writes:

 > But now when I run make, no info files are built.

This sounds like a bug to me (I would think a plain make should update
info files).  But perhaps you need to do a bootstrap to get the info
target made?

 > They are built by running `make info', which creates info/ in the
 > source directory and populates it.  So I suppose the next time I
 > update the branch I'll get a conflict again

Nope, as Andreas explained, you won't ever notice this again.

You can trust Bazaar to get this right.  In fact, ignoring the
directory is simply a convenience to prevent bzr from nagging you
about the "new" object created by Make (just like it's a convenience
for any build product).

If you have an existing branch old enough to still have the info
directory that you want to merge, no problem as long as the info
directory contains no unmerged changes.  bzr will merge the delete
operation for you.  Only if you have an old branch that contains
changes to the info directory that never made it to trunk will you get
a conflict.  But this is a "real" conflict that you need to resolve.

Re: info files

[Paul Eggert]

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Stephen Berman writes:
> 
>  > But now when I run make, no info files are built.
> 
> This sounds like a bug to me (I would think a plain make should update
> info files).

The GNU coding standards says that 'make all' need not
rebuild documentation files, and that 'make info'
should build them.

Re: info files

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Paul Eggert writes:

 > The GNU coding standards says that 'make all' need not
 > rebuild documentation files,

Then the coding standards are buggy! ;-)

Seriously, having "make" rebuild docs doesn't *violate* the standard,
does it?  AFAICS, it would be a one-time annoyance per existing
checkout: the first time you rebuild after the commit of "bzr rm
info", it would take a noticable amount of time.  But surely it's
hardly noticable in a "make bootstrap", and in any other situation
.texi files change far less frequently than C or Lisp source, and
rebuild quickly (except maybe the Lispref).

Re: info files

[Paul Eggert]

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> having "make" rebuild docs doesn't *violate* the standard,
> does it?

True.

> AFAICS, it would be a one-time annoyance per existing
> checkout: the first time you rebuild after the commit of "bzr rm
> info", it would take a noticable amount of time.  But surely it's
> hardly noticable in a "make bootstrap".

It takes quite some time even compared to a "make bootstrap",
I'm afraid.  On my platform (AMD Phenom II X4 910e, texinfo 5.2),
a fresh "make info" takes 3 minutes 19 seconds.  It can be parallelized with "make -j",
but some developers are still using older single-core machines,
considerably slower than what I use.

Plus, one doesn't need to run "make bootstrap" from a fresh checkout.

Re: info files

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 24 Dec 2013 10:02:22 -0800
> From: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> On my platform (AMD Phenom II X4 910e, texinfo 5.2), a fresh "make
> info" takes 3 minutes 19 seconds.      ^^^^^^^^^^^

Downgrade to makeinfo 4.x, and it becomes a snap, especially with -j.

Re: info files

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> Downgrade to makeinfo 4.x, and it becomes a snap, especially with -j.

Oh, so that's what it is.  I was building Gnus on this laptop and
thought something had crashed while making the Gnus manual, so I started
stracing and stuff to debug, but it eventually finished.

How did they manage to make makeinfo so much slower?

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  bloggy blog http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/

Re: info files

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> How did they manage to make makeinfo so much slower?

Oh, they rewrote it in Perl.  :-/

I compared building a smaller manual with Emacs compared to makeinfo:

[larsi@building texi]$ time emacs -batch -q -no-site-file -l ./infohack.el -f batch-makeinfo emacs-mime.texi 
real	0m1.567s
user	0m1.383s
sys	0m0.141s
[larsi@building texi]$ time makeinfo emacs-mime.texi 

real	0m2.885s
user	0m2.792s
sys	0m0.058s

So Emacs is now 2x faster than makeinfo.  But it seems to lack some
functionality:

@indicateurl is not handled by texinfo

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  bloggy blog http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/

Re: info files

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>
> Cc: stephen@xemacs.org,  Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Tue, 24 Dec 2013 19:37:56 +0100
> MailScanner-NULL-Check: 1388515433.76651@deLOJqbOnIz9iaAfMWfJWw
> 
> Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:
> 
> > How did they manage to make makeinfo so much slower?
> 
> Oh, they rewrote it in Perl.  :-/

Yep.  As result, makeinfo is about 20 times slower now.

> So Emacs is now 2x faster than makeinfo.  But it seems to lack some
> functionality:
> 
> @indicateurl is not handled by texinfo

texinfmt.el has not been updated with the latest Texinfo features for
a long time, because makeinfo is readily available.

Re: info files

[Stefan Monnier]

> It takes quite some time even compared to a "make bootstrap",
> I'm afraid.  On my platform (AMD Phenom II X4 910e, texinfo 5.2),

AFAIK the recent change made no difference in this respect: the Info
files were not under version control.  The only difference is that the
info/dir file is now rebuilt, which takes very little time,


        Stefan