On Wed, 3 May 2000, Karl Berry wrote:
> I think the solution is to have a command-line option that would refrain
> from generating @anchor directives, so that people who would like to keep
> compatibility with old Info readers could do so in a controllable manner.
>
> If authors are that concerned, they could put @if's in their Texinfo
> source to omit the @anchor's, corresponding @ref's, or whatever else.
On what should they condition their @if's, though? IIRC Texinfo
doesn't have any built-in define's such as version etc. that could be
used for that, like people usually do with compilers and libraries.
> Unfortunately, makeinfo 4.0 generates @anchor directives for every
> @footnote in the Texinfo source, so even if the author didn't use
> @anchor, the produced Info files could be incompatible with older Info
> readers.
>
> Wow, I didn't remember that.
Yep, me neither, until I bumped into this with the GDB manual and
looked in the sources.
> Do we rely on the Ref: for the footnote, though?
Under --footnote-style=end, makeinfo actually generates a
cross-reference to an anchor. Somehow, I have the feeling that a Ref:
tag in the tag table is generated regardless of the footnote style,
perhaps due to some bug. I will have to check.
