Re: Display of cross references to other manuals

[Luc Teirlinck]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

   If we decide that theses xrefs need work, it's IMHO entirely
   appropriate to manually change them.

I believe you vastly underestimate the number of such references that
are out there.  It would take an eternity to get just five percent of
them manually changed.  Manually changing a tiny fraction of xrefs,
say to explicitly mention the manual in the second argument, would
produce stylistic inconsistency and would hamper efforts to produce a
solid automated solution.  Hence I believe that it should not be done.

   Cross-references, like indexing, is a human activity; computers
   cannot cut it.

They can.  (Well, to be nit-pickingly correct: humans programming
computers can.)  The hardcopy output does.  Emacs Info does, be it in
a less "pretty" way, if you set Info-hide-note-references to nil.  (It
could be done in a prettier way by an XML-based Info reader.)

    For example, instead of

        (@xref{Narrowing, , , emacs, The GNU Emacs Manual}, for more
        information about the narrowing commands.)

    I'd write

        (@xref{Narrowing commands in Emacs, Narrowing, , emacs, The GNU
        Emacs Manual}, for more information about the narrowing commands.)

I believe the first and second arguments should be interchanged.  But
anyway, I do not see what this has to do with what we are talking
about.  "Narrowing commands in Emacs" just points out that we are
talking about narrowing commands in Emacs, rather than in Texinfo.
(There is no reason to do that: it is clear that we are discussing
Texinfo mode in Emacs.)  It does not indicate that this is a reference
to the Emacs _manual_.  There should be no need to point out a third
time in the second argument that this is a reference to the Emacs
manual.  That is done in the two last arguments already.  That is what
the last two arguments are for.  Of course an output format
implementation is not going to print the xref as such, but it should
convey all relevant information in the final output.  texi2dvi does
this and makeinfo does this.  The only problem is that Emacs Info with
Info-hide-note-references set to t hides the information that makeinfo
is trying to convey to the user.  Part of Juri's patch would actually
mend this.

Sincerely,

Luc.