Re: makeinfo 7.1 misses menu errors

[Gavin Smith]

On Sat, Jan 20, 2024 at 06:45:06PM +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> > That reply pertained to the case of a missing menu entry.  Your case
> > is the opposite: a superfluous menu entry.
> 
> To me, the manual with an entry leading to a node that do not
> corresponds to the sectioning structure is perfectly acceptable.  I
> still do not see any issue in having the need to set
> CHECK_NORMAL_MENU_STRUCTURE to get warnings.  I can't see why the user
> would not want to have a menu that do not follow the sectioning
> structure.

I have difficulty following the last sentence here.  Users may want
to have menus that follow the menu structure if they have existing
Texinfo documents that are structured that way, and they are not
ready or willing to delete all of their @menu blocks to generate all
menus automatically.

> To me it was true before, menus were/are as much a list of links as
> structuring commands, and it is even more so today, as now fully
> automatic menus can be obtained with descriptions with @nodedescription.
> Explicit menus are now needed only if one want a structure not following
> the sectioning structure.

This goes against the practice of the vast majority of existing Texinfo
manuals, so this existing practice should be well supported.

It seems to me that we should warn about the extra menu entry in some
way, either by turning CHECK_NORMAL_MENU_STRUCTURE on, or by devising
better warnings.

> I think that it could be possible to change the error location to be the
> menu, but it is not clear that it indeed is the menu, the error could be
> in the choice of the sectioning command, I think that we cannot really
> know where the real error is, the user need to have a look and decide if
> the menu or the sectioning is right.

I suppose it's possible the choice of section command could be wrong,
e.g. @section instead of @subsection etc. generating errors.  If we
change the error messages we should think about what are some common
mistakes a user might make in editing a document.