Re: Ability to disable URL mangling in makeinfo 4.7?

[Karl Berry]

    Thanks.  I'm not on the bug-texinfo list, and thus missed those.

Sorry, that was a mistake.  I didn't realize you weren't on the
recipient list.

    I strongly disagree with the arguments in that thread:

I'm sorry to hear it.

  - The new mangling schema might be okay for machines, but it is
    absolutely ugly for humans.

I agree it is ugly, which is quite unfortunate, but it is unambiguous.
Don't you think it's more important to be correct than pretty?  Do you
have an alternative scheme to propose?  Given that we have only a-z0-9_-
to work with, I don't see a way to do better.

  - By making that change, and regenerating our documents, lots of
    external links (from gcc.gnu.org itself and others) as well as
    bookmarks are broken.

I realize that this is a problem.  I suppose we could add anchors with
the old scheme, so that existing links would not be broken.  Would that
satisfy you?

    Currently, I am using a simple `sed -e 's/_002d/-/g' -e 's/_002a/*/g'`
    for  the GCC web pages, and given your feedback I assume I'll also need
    to apply this to all of our (other) texinfo-based documents. :-(

This is not a good solution, as I'm sure you'll agree, because it
creates a needless incompatibility between your documents and everyone
else's, and any Texinfo document that tried to link to yours would fail,
not to mention it makes more work for you.  Can't we find an approach
that we can both agree to?

k