Re: changes on “info” function in emacs 23

[Xah Lee <xahlee@gmail.com>]

wrote a clean summary on this issue:

• Emacs Manual Node Persistency Issues
  http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_manual_persistent_nodes.html

plain text version follows:
--------------------------------------------------

Emacs Manual Node Persistency Issues

Xah Lee, 2009-08-08

This page is a short note about emacs manual's node's persistency
across manual versions.

2 issues are noted here:

    * (1) Emacs Lisp function “info-copy-Current-node-name” changed
its output slightly, between emacs 22 and emacs 23.

    * (2) Emacs manual node entries are not persistent across manual
versions, this creates a problem of “bad link” references in existing
literature.

--------------------
info-copy-current-node-name

In emacs 22, when in info inside emacs, if i press “c” (info-copy-
current-node-name), i get the node name in my kill ring (aka clip
board), for example:

(elisp)System Environment

But in emacs 23, i get:

(elisp) System Environment

This change is not documented in the emacs 23 release notes (aka NEWS
file).

This change actually broke one of my personal elisp command. My
command turns a line of the form:

(emacs)dired

into

<span class="ref">(info "(emacs)dired")</span>

Note: This is a trivial issue. My command can be trivially fixed. This
section only record a elisp command's undocumented behavior change
that actually broke a user's code (me).

Note: however, this change did not break backward compatibility with
emacs 22. I've tested, that in emacs 22, both with or without the
extra space works.

--------------------
Info Node Persistency

A more important issue i just discovered is that some info node in
emacs 22 are gone in emacs 23.

In emacs 22, there's this node:

(info "(emacs)Transient Mark")

but it does not exit in emacs 23's manual.

Shouldn't the manual nodes be persistant across versions, e.g.
providing redirect when node changed?

As a pratical matter, this means now i have to search my emacs
publications to fix the nodes. A task that's not particularly trivial.
This applies to any publication on emacs that reference to the manual
by node.

This is a problem with Python's documentation too. thinking about
this, actually i don't know if there are any manual that:

    * (1) Provide a computable reference to the chapter/sections.
    * (2) Maintain this on different versions of the manual.

However, since emacs does (1) already, it's easy to do (2) too.

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄