Re: NS do not set INFOPATH

[Felix Mueller]

Hi,

* Adrian Robert -- [2009-05-17] writes:
> Felix Mueller <felix <at> enqueue.eu> writes:
>
>> an easier alternative would be to simply add a colon to resourcePath
>> in nsterm.m (~ line 418). This way, contents of INFOPATH and
>> Info-default-directory-list are merged when invoking info.
>
> I'm less familiar with this area than you, but it seems strange that
> emacs expects a user env setting for INFOPATH to have a path-separator
> already appended to it.  Shouldn't the code that  as you say merges
> INFOPATH and Info-default-directory-list take care of this?

I think, this is a deliberate choice (see texinfo manual): either merge
or overwrite.

>> I would typically not expect most of the programs I use to set an
>> environment variable by themselves, and I spent a couple of minutes
>> figuring out what was happening and checking for other places that
>> might be responsible for the INFOPATH environment variable. That's why
>> I wrote the email
>
> So it seems the problem is not with INFOPATH per se, but the whole
> approach used by ns-init-paths.  Would it be possible to use the
> alternative you posted for all of these other variables as well, or
> would they be adjusted too late?

I tried looking into this, but I am simply not familiar enough with
Emacs' startup. It seems to me, that this mechanism would not work
without additional, heavier changes to nsterm.m, unless you are ruling
out users moving their application bundle (bad idea, in my
opinion). While I do consider setting paths within a program via
environment variables "unexpected", the other variables have not been
problematic for me, so far. As far as I can tell, w32 uses a similar
approach (w32.c init_environment), and only excludes INFOPATH.

Thanks!

-- 
Felix Mueller
address@hidden