Ability to disable URL mangling in makeinfo 4.7?

[Gerald Pfeifer]

On Sun, 5 Sep 2004, Karl Berry wrote:
> I agree it is ugly, which is quite unfortunate, but it is unambiguous.
> Don't you think it's more important to be correct than pretty?  Do you
> have an alternative scheme to propose?  Given that we have only a-z0-9_-
> to work with, I don't see a way to do better.

We have been using things like #alpha*-*-* for many years, without
getting a single complaint.  I guess that's why I'm not too happy
about the makeinfo mangling change, even though I can see where you
are coming from.

>> - By making that change, and regenerating our documents, lots of
>>   external links (from gcc.gnu.org itself and others) as well as
>>   bookmarks are broken.
>
> I realize that this is a problem.  I suppose we could add anchors with
> the old scheme, so that existing links would not be broken.  Would that
> satisfy you?

Yes, that'd be very useful!

>> Currently, I am using a simple `sed -e 's/_002d/-/g' -e 's/_002a/*/g'`
>> for the GCC web pages, and given your feedback I assume I'll also need
>>  to apply this to all of our (other) texinfo-based documents. :-(
> This is not a good solution, as I'm sure you'll agree, because it
> creates a needless incompatibility between your documents and everyone
> else's, and any Texinfo document that tried to link to yours would fail,
> not to mention it makes more work for you.  Can't we find an approach
> that we can both agree to?

Are we restricted to the set of a-z0-9_- also for anchors?  Given our
experience, all web clients seem to support at least '*' as well.

If '-' is part of the supported set of characters, why do you rewrite
that as well?  Could this be avoided?

Gerald (sorry for the delay in responding to this; I'll be fully offline
 	for three weeks starting Sunday)