Re: bookmarks for concept index

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: address@hidden (Karl Berry)
> Date: Fri, 3 May 2002 09:54:39 -0400
> 
>     You could do this by using @defindex right now.
> 
> Eli, I don't understand, you mean define an index called `A'?

Not necessarily called `A', but an index where only items which start
with `A' are indexed.

> That seems pretty ugly :).

It might be ugly and slightly inconvenient, but it does work with all
past versions of Texinfo.

Seriously: I'm a bit worried about introducing new language features
matter-of-factly.  Texinfo doesn't have a graceful backward
compatibility feature, so a manual that uses a newly introduced
directive _forces_ users to upgrade to the latest Texinfo.  That is
not nice, IMHO.  Most other tools I know and use don't behave like
that, they always try to make changes back-compatible.

So I'd much prefer changes we make in the language are back-compatible,
in the sense that they do not cause older versions of makeinfo and
texinfo.tex to choke, or crash and burn.

Perhaps we should also add a feature which ignores unknown/unsupported
directives.  That won't help users of older versions now, but it will
help in the long run, when future versions introduce incompatible
changes.