Re: Have you all gone crazy? Was: On being web-friendly and why info must die

[Paul Eggert]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> You just gave up too soon, that's all.

No I didn't.  I switched from the info index (which didn't work for me first 
time) to a search engine (which did).  Why should I insist on slowing myself 
down with inferior technology?

Of course this was just one example, but it's representative.  It's long been my 
experience that search engines work better than traditional indexes for most of 
my questions about Emacs functionality.  And I don't think my experience is at 
all atypical.  Feel free to tweak the manually-maintained index, but in the end 
I expect the tweaks won't benefit most users.

> There are 880
> nodes in the ELisp manual, out of which 116, including "Time of Day",
> didn't follow that rule (they do now)

Thanks, that's undoubtedly an improvement to the manually-maintained index, but 
it underscores a problem with the way we're currently using Texinfo.  Here's an 
extract from the current emacs-24 documentation source:

* Standard Abbrev Tables::      Abbrev tables used by various major modes.
...
@node Standard Abbrev Tables
@section Standard Abbrev Tables
@cindex standard abbrev tables
...
* Standard Abbrev Tables::  Abbrev tables used by various major modes.

Although this kind of repetition may be needed in the *output* of makeinfo, it 
shouldn't be necessary in its *input*.  I know why each input line is there, and 
of course there are arguments for doing it in this annoyingly prolix and 
error-prone way, but overall it's clearly a mess that gets in the way of real 
improvements, and contributors shouldn't have to put up with this sort of thing.