On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 03:14:16PM -0500, Marc Green wrote: > > > If I am understanding the situation correctly, the problem is that > Pod::Checker does not issue an "unresolved internal link" warning when the > target of an L<> formatting code does not exist in the document *if* the > target is the prefix of another node in the document (i.e., is a prefix of > a =head or =item directive).
Exactly. > This functionality still exists in the Pod::Simple-based code, so the issue > won't be taken care of when Pod::Checker is replaced. Thus, we need to > decide whether or not the "L<> target shortcut" behavior should stay (and > perhaps be documented better) or go. Yep. My opinion is that it is better to have it go, it seems wrong to me. But I guess that my opinion does not count that much ;-). > I think Marek suggested that X<> can serve as a way to create an anchor > that can be linked to as a fix for the problem, because if that > functionality is implemented, then the "L<> target shortcut" behavior can > be removed. > > As Shawn said, there aren't many (if any) POD parsers that create indexes, > so X<> is not being used as much as the designer of the formatting code > thought it would be. (Note that I may be mistaken here. I am talking from > limited personal experience, so let me know if this is not the case.) Thus, > letting L<> targets link to X<>s sounds appealing to me. Then, in my opinion, in that case the pod specification should be changed such that X<..> is not referred to as index entries, but anchors (or labels). I think that it certainly makes more sense to have labels than index entries in Pod since there is no command to actually print the index while there is a good support for any kind of links with L<>. Still, I think that it should be one or the other since index entries and anchors are really distinct things. In fact, in general, anchors could be considered automatically as index entries, but the reverse is not true, as I argument in another mail. Thus it would not be that wrong if converters always automatically added index entries where there are link targets, in =head, =item (and X<..>). NOTE: in the converter to Texinfo I am doing, I used X<..> to do index entries, though the command that prints the index is not issued. In any case, the converter is not released yet, so it doesn't count... I guess that candidate converters that could use X<..> are converters to formats where index entries exist, such as DocBook and maybe LaTeX. -- Pat
