bug#27933: emacs25: default info dir initialization slow with remote filesystems

[Glenn Morris]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> >2. Why on earth is emacs checking the info path at all on startup?
>
> It doesn't do that here, not in the current development sources.
> After I start "emacs -Q", (featurep 'info) evaluates to nil and
> Info-directory-list is unbound.

Info-default-directory-list, which is the thing that stats the
filesystem, is autoloaded.

This area seems overly complicated, probably due to hysterical raisins.
IIRC we've discussed it before.

>> >3. The documentation talks about setting INFOPATH in the environment
>> >   to over-ride the use of this default directory list, but again
>> >   using strace I can see no change to behaviour here at all if I set
>> >   INFOPATH

The default still gets set, just not used. You might wonder, why bother
setting something that's not used...


Ideally Info-default-directory-list would go away. leaving only
Info-directory-list initialized in a standard fashion. But I haven't
looked at the details.