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Re: ":" in Scheme names.


From: Eli Zaretskii
Subject: Re: ":" in Scheme names.
Date: Sun, 3 Nov 2002 08:20:02 +0200 (IST)

On Sun, 3 Nov 2002, Aubrey Jaffer wrote:

> After updating to texinfo 4.1 makeinfo gives hundreds of messages,
> then fails processing slib.texi:
> 
>   ...
>   slib.texi:10619: warning: Info cannot handle `:' in index entry 
> `process:schedule!'.
>   slib.texi:10804: warning: Info cannot handle `:' in index entry 
> `si:conversion-factor'.
[...]
> These messages are triggered by definitions like:
> 
>   @deffn Procedure repl:quit
>   Exits from the invocation of @code{repl:top-level}.
>   @end deffn
> 
> The colon character (:) has been a legal component of Scheme
> identifiers since before 1986.  Although they didn't index correctly,
> earlier versions of makeinfo did not bail when encountering them.
> 
> 228 of SLIB's 1200 index entries are names incorporating colons.  SLIB
> is a GNU Project used by Guile.  Changing hundreds of decade-old
> function names in a dozen Scheme implementations seems an unreasonable
> burden merely to continue using texinfo.

You seem to misunderstand the issue: colons in index entries were _never_ 
supported by Info readers.  A colon is special in menu items and 
cross-references, and the Texinfo manual explicitly tells not to use that 
character in those circumstances.  The latest Texinfo simply prints a 
warning when it sees a colon in an index entry, but the produced Info 
file is not affected in any way, and makeinfo doesn't bail out when it 
sees such index entries.  It's just a warning.

In other words, the warning is meant to make the problem known to the 
manual maintainer(s), instead of silently producing a subtly broken 
manual.

If you just want to suppress the warnings (and thus get the previous 
behavior of makeinfo), invoke it with the --no-warn option.

Removing the special meaning of the colon in menus and xrefs is hard.  
Several ideas were suggested to deal with that problem, but AFAIK no one 
is currently working on implementing them.  Volunteers are welcome.




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