Re: [help-texinfo] Visible HTML anchors for options?

[David Malcolm]

On Fri, 2019-02-15 at 09:25 +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > From: David Malcolm <address@hidden>
> > Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2019 17:26:59 -0500
> > 
> > I'm a GCC developer; we use texinfo for our documentation.
> > 
> > GCC has a lot of options, so it's very useful to be able to provide
> > users with URLs to *specific* options in our documentation.
> > 
> > For a long time I didn't think texinfo's HTML generator provided
> > anchors for these, but using "View Source" shows it does.
> > 
> > For example, this .texi input:
> > 
> > @item address@hidden
> > @opindex flive-patching
> > Control GCC's optimizations to provide a safe compilation for live-
> > patching.
> > 
> > provides this HTML:
> > 
> > <dt><code>-flive-patching=<var>level</var></code></dt>
> > <dd><a name="index-flive-patching"></a>
> > <p>Control GCC&rsquo;s optimizations to provide a safe compilation
> > for
> > live-patching.
> > </p>
> 
> Why not use @anchor and @xref?  Those should produce visible links.

I'm hoping for some kind of way to get the toolchain to automatically
generate the HTML I want without having to touch all of the options in
our .texi source to get this.  FWIW, these items are within a "@table
@gcctabopt", and, now I look at it, gcctabopt is a GCC-specific texinfo
macro [1].

So maybe it's possible to fix this at our end by making that macro
smarter, somehow? (I'm definitely not an expert here).  Presumably I
want the macro I want to extract any opindex within the item, and
repeat it, within an @anchor.  Is this kind of thing expressible via
texinfo macros?

Unfortunately, I run into things like:

../../src/gcc/doc/cpp.texi:4375: warning: @anchor should not appear in @table 
(possibly involving @gcctabopt)
../../src/gcc/doc/cpp.texi:4375: empty argument in @anchor (possibly involving 
@gcctabopt)
../../src/gcc/doc/cpp.texi:4375: table requires an argument: the formatter for 
@item

when experimenting with e.g.:

@macro gcctabopt{body}
@anchor{\body\}
@end macro

as an alternative implementation of that macro.

Thanks; hope the above make sense.
Dave

[1] 
https://gcc.gnu.org/git/?p=gcc.git;a=blob;f=gcc/doc/include/gcc-common.texi;hb=HEAD