Re: Misleading Warning about Node Names

[Gavin Smith]

On Fri, Feb 9, 2018 at 12:15 PM, Rical Jasan <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> In the glibc manual, we have some @*refs to the GCC manual; e.g.:
>
> @xref{Debugging Options,, Options for Debugging Your Program or GCC,
> gcc.info, Using GCC}
>
> When running `make info', there are the following warnings:
>
> ./creature.texi:11: warning: @xref node name should not contain `.'
> ./string.texi:1089: warning: @xref node name should not contain `.'
> ./stdio.texi:1810: warning: @xref node name should not contain `.'
> ./stdio.texi:2732: warning: @xref node name should not contain `.'
> ./stdio.texi:3480: warning: @xref node name should not contain `.'
> ./stdio.texi:4035: warning: @ref node name should not contain `.'
>
> The warnings are not present when running `make html'.
>
> In all of these cases, it seems to be due to the "." in the
> info-file-name argument and not the node-name argument (they all have
> "gcc.info" and changing it to "gcc" makes the warnings go away).
>
> It seems that makeinfo is reporting the wrong argument as having bad syntax.

Thank you for the report and apologies for the late response. It
appeared from the code that this warning came about by accident. I
have committed a change that should stop the warning being issued in
such circumstances. Some kind of warning may be desirable as it is
probably wrong to have a "." in the file name argument, but I agree it
is confusing to refer to "node name" here.

> I also noticed while addressing this that in PDF output, the link
> changed from "gcc.info.pdf" to "gcc.pdf", so it also seems that the
> info-file-name argument is used for more than just info files.

Yes. I believe it is wrong to have "gcc.info" there instead of just "gcc".