Re: info

[Luc Teirlinck <teirllm@dms.auburn.edu>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

   The "Footnotes" line is generated by makeinfo from the @footnote 
   directives in the Texinfo source.  So if it stands in the way of what RET 
   should do in marginal cases, we should change makeinfo to do what we want 
   (and take into account that until the new makeinfo unseats the older 
   versions, some manuals will cause Info to fail in these marginal cases).

We are not just talking about footnotes, but about free lines as well.
Again, not an actual example, but an actual example with a blank line
(as well as some irrelevant lines) removed:
_____________________________________________________________________
Appendices

* Antinews::                Info for users downgrading to Emacs 20.
* GNU Free Documentation License:: The license for this documentation
* GPL::                     Conditions for copying and changing GNU
* Emacs.
* New Symbols::             New functions and variables in Emacs 21.
      --- The Detailed Node Listing ---

Here are other nodes that are inferiors of those already listed,
mentioned here so you can get to them in one step:

Introduction

* Caveats::                 Flaws and a request for help.
* Acknowledgements::        The authors, editors, and sponsors of this
* manual.
_______________________________________________________________________

My comments:

In the actual example, there was a blank line separating
      --- The Detailed Node Listing ---
from the previous line.

Again, I have seen no actual examples without such a blank line and
they would look ugly.  Going to "New Symbols" in the example would not
be that confusing to begin with.  If any examples like this occurred
in the dir file, then there would be worse things to worry about than
that.  If I understood Stefan correctly, his duplicate elimination and
sorting algorithm would very likely carry
      --- The Detailed Node Listing ---
to a place where it would make absolutely no sense, because his
algorithm would consider it part of the "* New Symbols::"-node,
since it is identical to the algorithm proposed by Kai and Richard.
(Stefan can correct me if I misunderstood him.)

I believe that actual occurrence of such (ugly) examples is very
unlikely.

Sincerely,

Luc.