Re: inforef

[karl@freefriends.org (Karl Berry)]

    I personally interpret it as meaning that @inforef is meant
    to be used when no _published_ manual is available, even though the
    user can produce printed output himself using texi2dvi.  

I don't think this was ever the intent.  Whether a manual was ever
published, i.e., available in a bookstore somewhere, seems unimportant
to me as far as cross references go.

    Others interpret it as meaning that no printed output can be
    produced because, for instance, the info file was not produced from
    Texinfo source.

That was its original purpose.  Eli's example of citing conditional text
is another good possibility.

    (texinfo)inforef' itself uses info.texi as an example, 

Originally, the Info manual was written directly in Info, and no Texinfo
source existed.  I expect that's where the example (and perhaps the
command) came from.

    In the HTML output, @inforef produces a hyperlink to an HTML manual,
    which could not be produced (or so I believe) if the
    Info file was not produced from Texinfo source.  

There's no particular reason why an HTML file could not be produced by
other means.

I agree that it's not completely logical for the HTML output to have a
link for @inforef, but it could be useful, and it's been that way since
the HTML support was written, so I'm loath to change it now.

    But could you please clarify this?

I fiddled with the inforef node in texinfo.txi to try to explain a
little better.

Thanks,
karl