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

From: Stefan Kangas <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2021 08:11:17 -0500

Gregory Heytings <[email-masked]> writes:

> A suggestion: when the info files bundled with Emacs cannot be found,
> download them from info.gnu.org (after asking the user if they're okay
> with that) and install them into ~/.emacs.d/info.  The info files that are
> supposed to be bundled with Emacs are not that big (about 5 MB, gzipped),
> and something similar (downloading data from a gnu.org site and install
> them into a ~/.emacs.d subdirectory) happens with M-x list-packages.

I like the suggestion.  It would be a fun hack, if nothing else.

But I think the Debian maintainers might be upset, and it would be easy
for them to then disable this functionality.  So in some ways, I'd
rather that users of Debian complain so that they fix the root cause:
that they don't ship GFDL manuals.  OTOH, that is exceedingly unlikely
to happen any time soon.

Perhaps the Debian maintainers won't care, and this is a fine solution
to the problem that they created.  It really is unfortunate that Emacs
is so crippled on the most popular GNU/Linux distributions, so we might
have reason to take a more aggressive stance.

So yeah, I don't know...