Re: [WWWDOCS] Bad links on http://gcc.gnu.org/install/specific.html

["Joseph S. Myers" <jsm at polyomino dot org dot uk>]

On Mon, 19 Jul 2004, Dave Korn wrote:

>   Originally the anchors had the same names as the target triples, asterisks
> and all.  Presumably someone decided this was a potential problem (URL
> encoding, anybody?) and that they should be changed to something safe.  So
> the asterisks are replaced by 002a in the internal anchors.

Texinfo 4.7 changed the algorithm for anchor and node naming (for node
naming at least, this guarantees future stability of names by encoding
special characters rather than lossily changing them in a way causing
problems if two node names only differ in some special characters).  
Because the internal links use @uref rather than proper Texinfo links, but
proper Texinfo @anchor is used, this broke things.  Unfortunately, when
Dean Wakerley contributed the conversion of the installation manual to
Texinfo it was a very literal conversion aiming to generate particular
HTML rather than follow proper Texinfo idiom, meaning the process to build
it is extremely fragile, and he vanished immediately after contributing it
rather than helping make it less fragile.

It really needs to change to use ordinary makeinfo split-file HTML output
without any hardcoded HTML in it (or any @uref for internal links) at all.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers               http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jsm28/gcc/
    jsm@polyomino.org.uk (personal mail)
    jsm28@gcc.gnu.org (Bugzilla assignments and CCs)