should index be empty in makeinfo docbook/xml output?

[Per Bothner]

I'm tring to contert texinfo to docbook, and thence to html using
the docbook xslt stylesheets.  (Whether or not this is a good idea
is open to discussion, but the docbook stylesheets make it somewhat
easier to customise the output, and to match existing pages, some
written using docbook.)

One complication is the index.  The docbook stylesheets will generate
index entries if the contents of the <index> is empty i.e. if there
are no <indexentry> or <indexdiv> children.

It turns out that neither the make-info generated index entries nor
the ones generated by the docbook-stylesheets are what I want: they
just link to the section containing a definition, rather than the
definition itself.  I.e. I want something like what the makeinfo
(at least the cvs version)  does when emitting html.

Tweaking the makeinfo-generated index entries looks impractical.
I can tweak the docbook-stylesheet-generated index, and that works
- as long as I manually remove the makeinfo-generated entries.

It is possible to tweak the docbook-stylesheets to ignore the
makeinfo-generated index entries, but I haven't figured out a clean
way to do it, i.e. without actually editing the stylesheets themselves
- as opposed to creating an override.

I would argue that what makeinfo is current doing is wrong.  It should
do one of two:
(1) *really* generate the index, which means making the index entries
be links to their definition, which would need id entries.
(2) have whoever makes use of the docbook be responsible for the index.

I think (2) makes more sense - for generating both 'docbook' and 'xml'.
In both cases we're converting texinfo to a fairly high-level
repesentation, and expanding the index doesn't seem appropriate.
In both cases you'd usually do further processing before you
attempt to display/print the document.

If people are agreed, I'll can work on a patch to supress index
generation for docbook and xml.
--
        --Per Bothner
address@hidden   http://per.bothner.com/