Re: (info browser) Should any default directories be used when INFOPATH is set?

[Gavin Smith]

On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 11:10 PM, Karl Berry k...@freefriends.org wrote:
 Here's another idea: a command-line option (for convenience in the
 tests) and .infokey variable (for convenience for users), e.g.,
 --infopath-no-default
 infopath-no-default

I've implemented this. It is accessible from the command line with
--variable infopath-no-defaults=On.

For the same reason, I need some way of either ignoring the user's
.info file, or using another file, so that files with recorded
keystrokes will always do the same thing. I intend to add the
--init-file option (which is mentioned in the list of option in the
GNU coding standards) to specify the .info file to read.

Re: (info browser) Should any default directories be used when INFOPATH is set?

[Karl Berry]

I've implemented this. It is accessible from the command line with
--variable infopath-no-defaults=On.

I saw.  Looks good.

--init-file option [...] to specify the .info file to read.

Sounds very good.

Thanks,
Karl

Re: (info browser) Should any default directories be used when INFOPATH is set?

[Gavin Smith]

On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 11:11 PM, Karl Berry k...@freefriends.org wrote:
 Because this behavior has been around so long, I fear that people
 setting INFOPATH now are likely to expect the merging with system
 directories, despite the documentation.  In other words, let's treat it
 as a doc bug and not a code bug.

 Therefore, I think we should change the documentation for INFOPATH to
 say that it does do the merging (as well as the extra colon
 expansion), and invent a new variable to define the entire info path
 without any additional defaults (no need for colon expansion there, I
 think).  Sound reasonable?

 The variable name that comes to mind is INFOPATH_OVERRIDE, not that I'm
 especially thrilled by it :).

 ?

There are a few options, none of them particularly nice. INFOPATH
could be adapted so that you could specify in some way that you don't
want the default info directory. Maybe you could specify NODEFAULT
as one of the directories (just as you can specify PATH as one of
the directories now.) (Not ideal, of course, as this is reducing the
directories to be searched rather than increasing them as always
happens at present.) Or there could be some other syntactical change.
(Like adding a colon at the end: maybe end with two colons, or begin
with a colon. This is no good, I know.)