Re: automatic anchors for definition commands.

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

Richard Stallman wrote:

   I prefer (D): continue handling this the way we do it now.

That means using essentially no anchors.  Prior to me making
additional anchors, there were a total of six anchors in all .texi
files included with the Emacs contribution: 4 in the Elisp manual, one
in the Emacs manual and one in gnus.texi.  (Result of grepping.)
I have currently made 20 anchors and if I keep doing what I am doing
now, that is about to explode into the hundreds.

   It is not hard to define teh anchors we actually want to use.

There is a difference between what is hard if one makes two or three
anchors and what is hard if one makes hundreds of anchors

   It might be ok...but still, is this change really necessary?

The conclusion is not _necessarily_ that one should make automatic
anchors for all definition commands.  The conclusion may be to
essentially make _no_ anchors to definition commands, maybe unless
they are referred to from docstrings.  That would reduce the number of
new anchors to be made by _well_ over ninety percent,

I am not convinced By Eli's reasons for not making anchors to
definition commands.  Essentially the reasons for that are empirical.
I have twenty concrete examples in mind and Eli's arguments do not
apply to them.  However, to me. a more relevant argument, is the one I
already mentioned before: definition commands are easy to find,
because they stand out clearly, _especially_ in the printed manual.
On the other hand, if you refer to the beginning of a paragraph that
looks like all other paragraphs, providing the reader with the _exact_
page number in the printed manual and the exact spot in Info becomes
more important.

So maybe that is what I will start to do: not just see how many lines
down the node the reference is in Info or how many pages off it is in
the printed manual, but how difficult to actually _find_ it really is.
That difference appears to be more important in the printed manual
than in Info.

If that is what we decide to do, then there is obviously no need for
automatic anchors for definition commands.  I would probably not
revert most anchors to definition commands I already made, although I
might revert some, because they might look just _too_ inconsistent
with other similar cases.

Sincerely,

Luc.