On 10/26/25 10:15, Jonathan Wakely wrote:
On Sun, 26 Oct 2025, 15:37 Sandra Loosemore, <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:The "Option Summary" in the GCC documentation now runs 30+ pages in the printed manual, and would be even longer if I added all the options presently missing documentation. Besides its length, there are no direct links from the options it names, to their documentation -- only to the containing section, many of which are also dozens of pages long. (The alphabetical option index at the end of the manual does link directly to the @opindex tag location in the detailed documentation.) Nowadays hardly anybody uses a paper manual and can rely on the search feature in their browser or PDF viewer to find what they're looking for instead, so perhaps the lack of direct links isn't a fatal flaw, but since the whole document is searchable, is the "Option Summary" still helpful to point you in the right direction? Do you find it useful?I find it invaluable, it's usually where I go to first when looking something up in the online html pages. I don't know which of the many, many pages an option is on, so I go to the summary, search for the option, then click through to the relevant page and search again to get to the option.
OK. I'm personally more likely to use the direct link from the option index to look up docs for a particular option I already know the name of and/or the PDF document instead of chunked HTML, but if other people use the option summary + text search then I will of course continue to support that usage.
BTW, I did take a quick look earlier at whether I could make the entries in the "Option Summary" also link directly to the docs for that option, but I didn't see an obvious way to do it with basic Texinfo usage. It might require some devious knowledge of Texinfo internals and/or dependencies on newer versions of Texinfo that have better HTML support and/or postprocessing of the HTML output, and for now I put that aside while trying to fill in docs for options that presently have none.
-Sandra
