Re: info goto node with dot

[Norbert Preining]

Hi Karl!

On Sa, 28 Jan 2006, Karl Berry wrote:
>     What was the reason that node names cannot contain the sequence
>             ". " or ".\t" etc
>     ??
> 
> The only thing I can think of is that it is somehow related to the dir
> file, which contains entries like this, with a period followed by
> whitespace:
> 
> * Bash: (bash).                     The GNU Bourne-Again SHell.
> ...
> * yes: (coreutils)yes invocation.               Print a string indefinitely.
> 
> Actually any menu entry can contain such things, but it's only typical
> in the dir file.
> 
> I can't see any fundamental reason why the above should be broken, and
> Emacs Info is proof-by-example that it can work, but it's all I can
> think of.
> 
> So my suggestion is, try getting rid of that test, and see if things
> basically work (and "matching vs. searching" can be found).  If it looks
> ok, let's go for it.  You see in the #if 0 there that I already got rid
> of one other overly-restrictive whitespace-related test.

Ok, matching vs. searching is found, but many nodes aren't found
anymore, eg the above example tells you that there is no node
        "yes invocation."
which is true, as the node is called "yes invocation".

If you don't have a genius idea how to overcome this problem (which does
*NOT ONLY* occur in dir files, but also in other files (index, concepts,
etc of various info files), I suggest we forget this and leave it like
it is "6.3.2 of texinfo.info: dots are not allowed in node names".

Otherwise I don't see how to fix the parsing problem.

Best wishes

Norbert