Subject: Re: bug#46236: 26.1; explicit the info files installation

From: Stefan Kangas <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2021 07:06:47 -0500

Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> writes:

> That depend on what we say.  We don't have to mention Debian or their
> repository explicitly -- which would also be better because other
> distros could have a similar problem.

I have never seen or heard of any other distribution ripping out the
manual and distributing it separately from Emacs itself.  Do you know of
any examples?

> My problem with the suggestion is that I don't have a good idea where
> to add the message.  We could:
>
>   . display a special message when a manual is supposed to be part of
>     Emacs; or
>   . modify the message in case of a manual that wasn't found to better
>     indicate that the user should try installing it
>
> We could also do both.

When I say `C-h r' without `emacs-common-non-dfsg' installed on my
Debian machine, I get "Info file emacs does not exist".  I get the same
message when trying to follow the Info node reference from
`C-h f pcase', but it is complaining about the elisp manual.

Perhaps we could just find where that message comes from, add a list of
manuals that should always exist, and warn the user there if they don't.

> But I don't think we should name the specific distros or their
> specific package names; that way lies madness of having to maintain
> those names forever.

Given that Debian and its derivatives have a fairly dominant position,
and are the only ones suffering from this, I think this maintenance
overhead would be small.

Our job also got easier recently since Debian abandoned their "emacsNN"
packages (where NN is the major version) in favour of just versioned
"emacs".  So the packages used to be named "emacs24-common-non-dfsg",
but now they are just named "emacs-common-non-dfsg".

IOW, I think this would be easy to do technically, but it would need us
to recommend the "non-free" repository.

I'm therefore starting to think that this should be the responsibility
of Debian.  They should solve the problems that they have created for
their users; such a warning should be added by *them*.  Doesn't that
make more sense?