Re: Warn about invalid node names

[Karl Berry]

Hi Glenn,

    Surely these people can live with the warnings, or use --no-warn?

No, people absolutely hate warnings, and absolutely hate using --no-warn.
I don't think users would be at all happy if their documents that have
always run through perfectly well started spewing zillions of (in their
opinions) useless warnings.

Another point is that many instances of those characters in node names
work fine.  It's only sometimes that the parsing is ambiguous.

However, what we could do, perhaps, is warn by default in the
problematic cases and invent a separate warning flag just for this
(--no-warn-node-names) or something.  I have always resisted splitting
warnings apart into a zillion categories a la gcc, but this case is
perhaps important enough to be an exception.

Another approach, and another reason we've never warned about it, is
that what we really want is to allow any characters in node names (or
anywhere else).  It would be better to give warning if we could also
inform people how they could change the source to use it.  I still have
not imagined any worked-out solution for that, though.  And since it
necessarily involves changes to Info readers (as far as I can imagine),
the resulting Info files would not be very widely usable.

All in all, it's an unhappy mess and I just haven't had the gumption to
untangle it.

karl