Re: inconsistent spaces in menu and in node and @-commands

[Patrice Dumas]

On Thu, Aug 18, 2022 at 02:16:36PM +0100, Gavin Smith wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 18, 2022 at 02:31:15PM +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> > On Wed, Aug 17, 2022 at 06:35:31PM +0100, Gavin Smith wrote:
> > > On Wed, Aug 17, 2022 at 07:11:05PM +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> > > > Check in texi2any
> > > > that the expansion of the node on the menu line match or not and
> > > > determine based on that information rather than on the Texinfo node name
> > > > whether an error should be output?
> > > 
> > > It's more complicated that way.
> > 
> > It is solved for Info now (I also tested the emacs Info reader, it is
> > also ok in recent versions).  But I think that there is still something
> > to be done in the parsers or in Structuring.pm, such that the node is
> > found as a target in other formats, and in particular HTML.
> 
> What use case is this supposed to support?  If it is just double
> spaces in node names then I doubt that this is worth worrying about.

It probably does not support any relevant use case.  In theory there
could be some relevant use case, as some case can be constructed in
which automatic nodes cannot be right but manual nodes can.  But I am
not sure that these cases corresponds to constructs that could be seen
in real manuals to begin with.  So it is not important, and there will
already be errors output in any case, so the user should not be to
surprised to have some inconsistent behaviour among formats.  It is just
that it could be confusing to have some links that can be followed in an
output and not in another (independently of the errors).

So, I think that it is not worth worrying about, but it could still be
nice to have more consistency between equivalence between nodes as
obtained by the node names normalization and actual equivalence between
nodes.  I have added it to the tp/TODO, at the bottom of Delayed bugs
which is a place for issues we do not really worry about...

> Perhaps "@ " in a node name should issue an error or warning.

There are already errors and warnings when the link cannot be found,
and sometime when it is found, it is ok.  The issue is not about
errors and warnings, but about consistency with the links that
can be followed in HTML and Info.

-- 
Pat