Re: values set in @settitle before they are defined

[Karl Berry]

Hi Pat,

    My personnal thinking is that a value appearing before the
    definition with @set should be undefined.

By undefined, do you mean simply empty output, with no warning?  That
doesn't seem right to me.  If you say @value{foo} and foo hasn't been
@set, surely we want to complain.

Anyway, in general, the issue here is that makeinfo does not try to
parse things it does not use, and it does not use the @settitle argument
-- except in the --xml output case.  When I run makeinfo --xml on your
sample doc, I get the expected warning.

In general, if there's an error with _either_ makeinfo (any output
format) or texi2dvi, it's erroneous.  There are many errors texinfo.tex
does not try to detect, and there are a few errors (like this one) that
makeinfo does not try to detect, or only detects in certain output cases.

That's the goal.  But there are unfortunately spurious errors from
makeinfo in some cases of valid input, notably for plain text output.
Someday ...

Overall, changing makeinfo to detect errors in unused parts of the input
doesn't seem like high enough priority to ever get done :(.

Happy 2005,
karl