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This in reference to this question. Many thanks to user Marcus Müller for providing the silver bullet for getting Emacs 29 from Debian backports. I've done this already, and profited.

However, one thing remains: the Emacs 28 documentation still lingers. I'm assuming I need to do sudo apt install emacs-common-non-dfsg/bookworm-backports, but this gives me a "referred to by another package" message. Perhaps this is a mistake from the Debian side (the backport author simply forgot to include the package)? Hopefully I can get the ball rolling from any insight into this matter.

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Your guess is correct, the package hasn’t been backported. The best way to fix that is to file a wishlist bug asking for a backport (run reportbug emacs-common-non-dfsg and follow the prompts).

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As a workaround, you can download the Emacs source archive and manually install the info pages:

mkdir -p /usr/local/share/info
cp -a emacs-29.4/info/* /usr/local/share/info

cd /usr/local/share/info
rm -f dir
for f in *info*; do install-info $f dir ; done

You may also need to remove the old info pages: sudo apt-get autoremove emacs-common-non-dfsg

Alternatively, you can opt to install to a user directory such as $HOME/info and add that to your INFOPATH environment variable.

In Emacs, see also the Info-directory-list variable (note it starts with a capital I).

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Here's an approach that's more convenient than downloading from source:

  1. Download the latest deb from the Debian package page, e.g. emacs-common-non-dfsg_30.1+1-1_all.deb. (Linked from "all" in the Architecture column.)
  2. sudo apt install emacs-common-non-dfsg_30.1+1-1_all.deb

And IMO an even more convenient approach is to add sid as repository and use apt_preferences to give packages from sid low priority. This will allow you to use apt to install and manage emacs-common-non-dfsg from sid, without pulling in everything else that happens to be in sid.

  1. Add deb http://deb.debian.org/debian sid non-free to /etc/apt/sources.list.
  2. Create /etc/apt/preferences.d/sid.pref with the content
Package: *
Pin: release n=sid
Pin-Priority: 2

BTW the Debian bug was closed -- you can see the package maintainer's explanation here.

Note that emacs in backports is currently at 30.1, but regardless, the issue is the same.

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