Re: @menu puts too many restrictions to produce the .info file

[Christopher Dimech]

Good evening Gavin. I have actually.

My original plan was to have multiple menus for different types of users,
so they may traverse it according to the job they want to do.  Many, including
myself end up having to go though a lot of menu paths to get what I need.
So it is customary for me to simply take the texi files and traverse using some
scripts rather than using info.  I used to use Next/Prev/Up, although a bit 
tedious
to specify three things for each node.

Much rather have a switch that lets me set any menu the way I want without 
starting
whining at me.  Not everybody requires the same level of detail and for some 
users,
many nodes would be irrelevant for them.  As a workaround I been making nodes
with a sort of "menu" but really using @ref for the links.

Does my wrangling make sense, or do you see problems in using info in the said 
way?
Info works well, until you start focusing on abbreviated ways of doing a job 
and you
got to use the manual.  There are some packages with just an info manual which 
I find
difficult to use.  I prefer html entirely on one page for rapidity.

---------------------
Christopher Dimech
General Administrator - Naiad Informatics - GNU Project (Geocomputation)
- Geophysical Simulation
- Geological Subsurface Mapping
- Disaster Preparedness and Mitigation
- Natural Resource Exploration and Production
- Free Software Advocacy


> Sent: Saturday, October 31, 2020 at 10:04 PM
> From: "Gavin Smith" <gavinsmith0123@gmail.com>
> To: "Patrice Dumas" <pertusus@free.fr>, "Christopher Dimech" 
> <dimech@gmx.com>, "help-texinfo gnu" <help-texinfo@gnu.org>
> Subject: Re: @menu puts too many restrictions to produce the .info file
>
> On Tue, Oct 20, 2020 at 05:59:56PM +0100, Gavin Smith wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 20, 2020 at 04:53:11PM +0100, Gavin Smith wrote:
> > > If an author wants to have irregular menu or node structures for some
> > > reason (I haven't made sense exactly of what Christopher is doing
> > > with his documents) then they could use explicit node pointers,
> > > specifying Next/Prev/Up for each node.
> >
> > Another idea is to make it so that if a node has explicit node
> > pointers, then its menu would not be used to determine structural
> > relations between nodes.  The menu, along with the node pointers, would
> > be trusted to be correct, and intended by the author, but not used
> > for anything else.
>
> Did you think about whether this would be a good idea?  I explained
> this in more detail in another message.
>