Re: Invisible colons in Emacs Info.

["Stefan Monnier" <monnier+gnu/emacs@cs.yale.edu>]

> Karl Berry wrote:
> 
>        Mtools:(mtools).        Mtools:
> 
>        a valid subtopic name?
> 
>    According to what we've discussed, that is invalid because the space
>    between the : and the ( is missing.  I thought we had all agreed on this?
> 
> You and me agreed, but I do not believe Stefan ever did.  Otherwise
> there would have been no reason for his recent changes.

My recent change was done for the following reasons:

1 - centralize the definition of what is an acceptable menu entry name
2 - centralize the definition of what is an acceptable node name
3 - get rid of ad-hoc parsing code and use a more declarative style
    using regexps.
4 - accept some old menu entries (that are now considered invalid) as long
    as we can unambiguously recognize them.

I'm fine with labelling menu entries that lack the space after the colon
as invalid, but I see no reason not to tweak the regexp such that we can
still recognize some of those old entries (as long as such tweaking does
not impact valid cases).
My change makes the code accept more cases than what we consider as "valid",
but that seems like a feature rather than a bug since such entries exist
and were valid until Emacs-21.3.  Of course, the priority should be given
to the correct treatment of valid entries.


	Stefan