Re: [help-texinfo] Search full content of all info nodes similar to 'man -K '

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Michael Convey <address@hidden>
> Date: Fri, 31 Jul 2015 14:22:26 -0700
> Cc: Gavin Smith <address@hidden>, address@hidden
> 
> On Fri, Jul 31, 2015 at 2:12 PM, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
>     > From: Michael Convey <address@hidden>
>     > Date: Fri, 31 Jul 2015 11:59:43 -0700
>     > Cc: "address@hidden" <address@hidden>
>     >
>     > ​$ info -- apropos ​
>     > ​\'\-\-\'
>     > info: No available info files have ''--'' in their indices.
>     
>     Why in the world would you want to look for that? What stuff did you
>     _really_ want to find?
>     
> I was trying to determine how universal '--' is for delimiting the option 
> list.

How would you determine this using the results of the search?  I think
you expected to see a literal '--' in a manual, but (a) many if not
most manuals nowadays use Unicode quoting as in ‘--’, and (b) I never
saw this literally shown as an option, instead you'd see something
like this:

  [...] As with most programs, the special argument ‘--’ says that all
  subsequent arguments are file names, not options, even if they start
  with ‘-’.

(The above is from the Emacs manual.)

Therefore, the following commands

  info --apropos "command line"
  info --apropos "invoking"

are IMO a more efficient way of finding the information you were
looking for, because you need to see the surrounding context, not just
a single line, to understand what does the manual say.

In any case, I don't object to having a literal text search option in
Info, I just think that the use cases which justify it are few and far
in-between, and quite a few of those that people think of are better
served by the --apropos searches in indices.