Completely broken Info reader

[stan]

On Tue, 08 Sep 2009 21:43:18 -0700
Suvayu Ali <fatkasuvayu+linux at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thank you Stan for the reply. I tried removing info but it takes with
> it about 877 dependencies so i tried `yum reinstall info' instead. I
> still have that problem.
> 
> Are you using 32 bit Fedora? As it mentions on Bug 515402 [1] its 

No, F11 x86_64.  Very strange that it works on my system and not on
yours.  I'm using a kernel with the Fedora patches applied, but custom
compiled for my system; maybe that is the difference.

> specific to 64 bit systems. What could be the proper way to try to
> track down this problem? I'm rather used to the emacs like
> bindings... :-/
> 

Well, I used to use emacs a long time ago, but switched to vim, so maybe
if info had vim bindings I would feel the same.  :-)

I think the way to do it properly is to install the info-debuginfo pkg
and then run gdb on info e.g. gdb --args info bash.  By stepping through
the code as it executes you would find the point where it failed, and
thus the place to fix.  There is a reasonably steep learning curve to do
this, though the info documentation for gdb is good and you only need to
learn a small subset of gdb commands.  And it requires that you have at
least a nodding acquaintance with C (in order to understand what is
being done wrong when you find the error).

> [1]https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/texinfo-4.13a-4.fc11
> 

On my system, info Autoconf 'Autoconf Macro Index' works fine.

But I see that I have the patched version of the texinfo package,
texinfo-4.13a-4.fc11.x86_64, because I have updates testing enabled.
That probably explains why it works for me.  I see from the link you
give above that it has been submitted to stable, so it should start
working for you too if you update your system after it appears in
updates (a day or two?).

However, I never noticed it not working, though info isn't something I
use hourly or even always daily.