Re: bad relative urls in texinfo-4.0f

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2002 14:26:46 -0800
> From: Per Bothner <address@hidden>
> > 
> > Unfortunately, it's not always practical to request that, given how
> > many characters we replace with dashes.  Think about manuals that
> > describe C++ classes,
> 
> I do.  The only characters likely to require mapping are things
> like 'operator+' and possibly '::'.

No, there are much more characters that are mapped to a dash. `*',
`/', `^', `.', and many others.

> > or about manuals such as the Groff one, 
> 
> What groff manual?

See ftp://groff.ffii.org/pub/groff/.  The development version is in
devel, if you want to see the latest version of the manual.

> Still, how many *actual* mnauals have you come across where this was an
> real problem?

I don't think it matters.  The possibility exists, and it is real.
So I think makeinfo should DTRT with that, rather than barf or
overwrite one file with another.  It is simply not a clean design to
do that, IMHO.

> And in how many of those cases would the manual authors rather fix
> the node names rather than have clashing nodes unintentonally end up
> on the same page?

IMHO, it's no business of makeinfo to force authors to fix their
manuals due to the file-name clashes.  There's nothing wrong with a
Texinfo manual which has two nodes like ".Foo" and "/Foo".  Before
Texinfo 4.1, such a file would be accepted with no complaint, and
would produce a valid HTML file.  It's IMHO wrong to reject it in the
next release.

The only situations where makeinfo should refuse to produce valid
output is when the source violates the Texinfo language.