Re: [bug #42897] texi2any does not bark at incorrect menu entry, and makes erroneous info output

[Gavin Smith]

On Fri, Aug 1, 2014 at 8:43 AM, Vincent Belaïche
<address@hidden> wrote:
> I attached some exemple temp.texi, and the corresponding output temp.info.
>
> The problem in temp.texi is at line 58:
>
>
> * À propos de ce document:About this document. reporter les bogues, etc.
>
>
> There is a missing space between `:' and `About' which is not conformant to
> texinfo manual.
>
> However texi2any does not bark at it, and make some info output that the emacs
> viewer does not handle correctly. Here is what I see with the viewer:
>
I couldn't find out how to display an arbitrary file in emacs Info so
can't test this. The standalone Info viewers I tested found the target
node name fine without the space. I don't think that a space after the
colon should be required. However, I think emacs Info has some support
of colons in menu labels which could be what is causing this problem.
There is this comment in the Info source (emacs 24.3):

;;; Commentary:

;; Note that nowadays we expect Info files to be made using makeinfo.
;; In particular we make these assumptions:
;;  - a menu item MAY contain colons but not colon-space ": "
;;  - a menu item ending with ": " (but not ":: ") is an index entry
;;  - a node name MAY NOT contain a colon
;; This distinction is to support indexing of computer programming
;; language terms that may contain ":" but not ": ".

Hence it is possible that it needs ": " to end a label, althought I
haven't been able to test this. There should be a way of managing
without it - that would be an issue for emacs to see if it can support
this syntax.

If such syntax were to be declared invalid, it occurs to me that it
would be hard to warn about it. A menu can contain comments, so how
could you tell between a comment and a malformed menu entry?