[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: changes on “info” function in emacs 23
From: |
Xah Lee |
Subject: |
Re: changes on “info” function in emacs 23 |
Date: |
Sat, 8 Aug 2009 16:47:59 -0700 (PDT) |
User-agent: |
G2/1.0 |
wrote a clean summary on this issue:
• Emacs Manual Node Persistency Issues
http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_manual_persistent_nodes.html
plain text version follows:
--------------------------------------------------
Emacs Manual Node Persistency Issues
Xah Lee, 2009-08-08
This page is a short note about emacs manual's node's persistency
across manual versions.
2 issues are noted here:
* (1) Emacs Lisp function “info-copy-Current-node-name” changed
its output slightly, between emacs 22 and emacs 23.
* (2) Emacs manual node entries are not persistent across manual
versions, this creates a problem of “bad link” references in existing
literature.
--------------------
info-copy-current-node-name
In emacs 22, when in info inside emacs, if i press “c” (info-copy-
current-node-name), i get the node name in my kill ring (aka clip
board), for example:
(elisp)System Environment
But in emacs 23, i get:
(elisp) System Environment
This change is not documented in the emacs 23 release notes (aka NEWS
file).
This change actually broke one of my personal elisp command. My
command turns a line of the form:
(emacs)dired
into
<span class="ref">(info "(emacs)dired")</span>
Note: This is a trivial issue. My command can be trivially fixed. This
section only record a elisp command's undocumented behavior change
that actually broke a user's code (me).
Note: however, this change did not break backward compatibility with
emacs 22. I've tested, that in emacs 22, both with or without the
extra space works.
--------------------
Info Node Persistency
A more important issue i just discovered is that some info node in
emacs 22 are gone in emacs 23.
In emacs 22, there's this node:
(info "(emacs)Transient Mark")
but it does not exit in emacs 23's manual.
Shouldn't the manual nodes be persistant across versions, e.g.
providing redirect when node changed?
As a pratical matter, this means now i have to search my emacs
publications to fix the nodes. A task that's not particularly trivial.
This applies to any publication on emacs that reference to the manual
by node.
This is a problem with Python's documentation too. thinking about
this, actually i don't know if there are any manual that:
* (1) Provide a computable reference to the chapter/sections.
* (2) Maintain this on different versions of the manual.
However, since emacs does (1) already, it's easy to do (2) too.
Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/
☄