Subject: Re: bug#1188: Info reader and newlines in dir file

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2008 10:28:06 +0200

> From: [email-masked]
> Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:38:45 -0500
> Cc: 
> 
> I built and installed the MySQL Info manual.  The manual would show up
> in the dir node when I invoked `info' from the command line but was
> nowhere to be found when I invoked `info' within Emacs.  I tracked
> this down to the fact that the MySQL entry in the Info dir node was
> the last one and that there was no newline after it.  Inserted a
> newline allowed Emacs to "see" the manual and load it up properly
> inside Info running in Emacs.  This might be purposeful design, but it
> feels like a bug to me: Emacs Info should behave like the command-line
> info and not any different.

The Emacs Info reader and the stand-alone Info reader are two
different implementations of the same informal specification.  There's
no formal specification of the structure of a valid Info file.  So
there's little hope for both of them working identically in bordeline
cases such as this one, especially since they are written in two very
different programming languages.  As a matter of fact, they have
different features, albeit minor ones.

I would also argue that an entry in DIR without a newline is a bug in
whatever procedure you followed to install that Info manual.

Bottom line, my recommendation is not to try to fix this, at least not
now, for fear of breaking something more important at the time when
the efforts are on fixing real bugs (of which there are too many, IMO)
in order to begin the pretest.  But that's me.