Re: Problem building emacs-lisp-intro.dvi.

["Robert J. Chassell" <bob@rattlesnake.com>]

   What relevance has the release date of Emacs 20 here?

Backward compatibility.  

Eli said

    IIRC, the -I switch was supported by makeinfo since day one.

which may be the case.  However, the Texinfo manual (version 4.8, 29
December 2004) says

`-I DIR'
     Append DIR to the directory search list for finding files that are
     included using the `@include' command.  By default, `makeinfo'
     searches only the current directory.  If DIR is not given, the
     current directory `.' is appended.  Note that DIR can actually be
     a list of several directories separated by the usual path
     separator character (`:' on Unix, `;' on MS-DOS/MS-Windows).

I do not know whether texinfo.tex, which is input with a `\input'
command, is considered an `@include' file.



Incidently, the earliest log message for the switch that I see in
emacs/man/Makefile.in is from 6 April 1998:

  revision 1.13
  date: 1998-04-06 10:33:02 +0000;  author: schwab;  state: Exp;  lines: +18 -17
  (ENVADD): Enviroment vars to pass to texi2dvi.  Use
  it in dvi targets.
  (../etc/GNU): Change to $(srcdir) first.

which is after Emacs version 20.2 was released on 19 September 1997
and before Emacs version 20.3 was released on 19 August 1998.

-- 
    Robert J. Chassell                         
    bob@rattlesnake.com                         GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8
    http://www.rattlesnake.com                  http://www.teak.cc