Re: Warning about ":" in @ref

[Raymond Toy]

On 8/4/23 4:56 PM, Gavin Smith wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 04, 2023 at 04:06:47PM -0700, Raymond Toy wrote:
> > With texinfo 7.0.2 (which comes with Fedora 38), I get warnings like:
> >
> > |warning: @ref node name should not contain `:' |
> >
> > The offending ref is “@ref{ext:encapsulate}”, and corresponding anchor is
> > “ext:encapsulate”. I didn’t see anything in the manual about this
> > constraint, but I didn’t look too hard. However, if there shouldn’t be a
> > colon in a @ref, shouldn’t there a corresponding warning if an anchor
> > contains a colon too?
>  From (texinfo)Node Line Requirements:
>      Unfortunately, you cannot reliably use periods, commas, or colons
>      within a node name; these can confuse some Info readers.
>
>  From (texinfo)@anchor:
>         Anchor names share the same constraints as nodes on the characters
>      that can be included (*note Info Node Names Constraints::).
Thanks.  As I said, I didn't look too hard; I trusted the warning to be 
correct.
> I guess an anchor with a problematic name only becomes a problem if you
> actually link to it, but I've nothing against such warnings being added
> in principle, if somebody wanted to do the work to do so.
Sorry, I'm illiterate in Perl. :-(

> > In the particular manual, there are lots of anchors that contain colons but
> > most of them are not referenced via @ref. (For whatever reason.)
> How curious!
Yeah, I don't really know the history of this.   It's a document that 
was, possibly, in Scribe, that was later converted to latexinfo, then 
latex (using hevea to convert to html) and then finally texinfo.  It's 
possible that somewhere along the line,references to the anchors were 
dropped.  It was hard getting a supported tool to convert latex to html, 
so converting to texinfo seemed like the best way given that texinfo 
probably won't go away and does support html.   (Thanks!)