Re: automatic generation of @menu entries

[Mike Frysinger]

On 12 Sep 2021 11:44, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Sun, 12 Sep 2021 03:38:24 -0400
> > From: Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org>
> > Cc: help-texinfo@gnu.org
> > 
> > > Not the answer you expected, but Emacs has a command that creates the
> > > menus for you.
> > 
> > i saw mention of that shortcut in the manual, but as you can imagine, that's
> > not terribly interesting to me.  i don't use emacs, and i'm not expecting
> > everyone else who helps maintain texinfo sources to use emacs.
> > 
> > but if there's an emacs shortcut to autogenerate/update, it implies that
> > making an actual texinfo command to do it isn't unreasonable ?
> 
> It's just something that needs to be (re)implemented in a different
> PL.  Also, it needs to be generated before the nodes are validated,
> since the menu is used for that, and it needs to be fast enough.

based on the manual description, it sounds like the tree structure is
accessible already since that's how the @contents are generated, and
it's able to output that just fine.  so i (naively) assume that adding
an automatic menu would be comparable.

> It would also mean the produced menu items will lack the short
> descriptions, which are produced by a human typing them in Texinfo.

right, that's why i suggested a new @menudesc to retain that part (if
the existing @unnumberedsec and such are insufficient).
-mike

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