Re: Including files from parent dir

On Tue, Sep 13, 2022 at 08:14:48PM -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> 
> There's something I don't understand about @include:
> 
> Say, I have:
> 
>     doc/foo.texi
>     doc/gpl.texi
>     bar.texi
> 
> if my `foo.texi` has
> 
>     @include gpl.texi
>     @include ../bar.texi
> 
> I will be able to use successfully both
> 
>     cd doc; makeinfo --no-split foo.texi -o ../foo.info
> 
> will work fine, but
> 
>     makeinfo --no-split doc/foo.texi -o foo.info
> 
> will signal an error that it can't find `../bar.texi`
> (note: it *did* find `gpl.texi`).
> 
> Why are the two includes treated differently?

It is because includes with leading . or .. in their paths in or include
that are absolute paths are treated differently from other includes:
they are not searched for in include directories.

Also, when you call

 makeinfo --no-split doc/foo.texi -o foo.info

the doc/ directory is included in the @include search path in addition
to the current directory, therefore gpl.texi is found.  The ../bar.texi
include file is still only searched for relative to the working directory.

Unless I missed something, none of these two information is documented.

> How can I convince `makeinfo` to find the `bar.texi` file in both cases?

Right now, I can't think of a way to make this happen.  The only
thing I can think of would be to change the code to consider that
only paths with leading . are considered differently.

-- 
Pat