On Wed, 5 Apr 2000, H. Nanosecond wrote:
> I got ddd-3.2.1 and it has info files generated from the ddd.texi file
> by texinfo version 4.0.
> But I try to read it with info version '(GNU texinfo 3.12) 2.18'
> and press enter in the menu
> I get 'Sample Session: No such file or directory' for all except the
> first menu item.
I cannot even try to reproduce this, as I don't have DDD installed.
Please consider looking into the problem a bit closer and telling what
exactly causes Info 3.12 to fail.
Failing that, could you make the DDD Info files available somewhere,
so I could download them and look around without fetching the entire
DDD distribution?
> I got version 4.0 and it reads it fine.
>
> I think this is may be a bug because older info programs should read
> files generated by new versions if possible.
I don't think you can have this. If a newer version of Info would
refuse reading files produced by an older version of makeinfo, *that*
would be a bug, because back-compatibility should be preserved. But
in your case, it's the other way around. Texinfo 4.0 introduces a
couple of new features, such as anchors, that older versions of Info
simply cannot be expected to support.
So, in general, this kind of ``forward compatibility'' cannot be
relied upon.
I think that the real issue here is the vigilance on the part of the
package (DDD, in this case) maintainers. They should refrain from
using new features introduced in Texinfo 4.0 until such time as
Texinfo 4.0 can be expected to be installed by the vast majority of
end users. If the problems you reported turn out to be real ones (as
opposed to some installation/setup messup), I'd suggest to report this
as a bug to the DDD maintainer(s).
