Re: report with biggest nodes

[Patrice Dumas]

On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 03:28:29PM -0800, Karl Berry wrote:
> decisions.  If we add a feature which lets humans get away with not
> making them, we aren't doing anyone a service.

I disagree, in my opinion, it is better to let the user choose to have
some menu and/or node entries generated automatically, we should
expect that users do the right thing.

>     My idea was to automatically generate menu entries that are not
>     already done by the user.
> 
> "Generate"?  Certainly we're not rewriting the original source file, so
> where are you generating them?

I would like to do 2 things.
1. Generate missing nodes and menu entries when generating the output,
   by adding them to the tree after parsing (approximately when figuring 
   out the structure of the document).
2. outside of texi2any, code a tool that rewrites Texinfo code, adding
   missing nodes and menu entries.

Item 2. is much more complicated than 1., as one has to keep track of the
user defined @-commands and @value expansion, as well as @include files.
This therefore is dependent on an implementation of the sourcemark idea.


> Anyway, my intuition is that it would be better to give warnings about
> menu items missing, rather than "generating" replacements, because of
> the above.

This is already what is done (though this may be errors and not warnings), 
and it is done since a very long time.

> But, we don't need to decide any of this now, right?

To me it is already decided, but you may not be ok with it... Something is
a bit odd, however, I am pretty sure that we already discussed about it
more than once.  First it was in my GHM presentation, then we discussed
it more, also as part of having stuff done by emacs available out of 
emacs.  And it is the first item in the main TODO for Makeinfo (though
I think I did add it myself ;-).

I also have another use case, when generating Texinfo from other formats,
in general something like @node or @menu doesn't exist while ref can be
made to sectioning commands.  I ran into that when doing the pod2texi 
translator (did I announce that I did that translator?) and with the missing
automatic node/menu generation, I have to add anchors like

  @section My section
  @anchor{My section}

to be able to do cross refs correctly.


As a side note, for now I am doing 2 things in parallel while waiting for
the release, tests cleanups and enhancements, and preparing for the 
automatic generation of nodes and menus...

-- 
Pat