Node references in menus and cross-references

[Eli Zaretskii]

Hi,

Currently, there seem to be subtle differences in the syntax of node
references in menus vs node references in cross-references.  This is
contrary to the Texinfo manual saying that they are identical:

           <menu> =
       * Menu:
       (<menu entry> | <menu comment>)*

     The parts of a <menu entry> are also described in *note Menu Parts::.
  They have the same syntax as cross-references, with a leading ‘*’
  instead of ‘* (N|n)ote’ (*note Info Format Cross Reference::).

A test Info file provided by Patrice for testing the Emacs
implementation, here:

  https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=57277#11

includes a menu item like this:

* the topic:blumpty.fump.

This menu item has a period embedded in the node name "blumpty.fump",
but it is not quoted.  As result, the Emacs Info reader thinks that
the node name is "blumpty".

Patrice tells me that this is done for compatibility reasons with old
Texinfo versions (including the makeinfo implementation in C).  This
might be so, but the Emacs Info reader never supported such menu
entries, and neither does it support them today.  Moreover, the old
implementation could not use any quoting mechanism, whereas nowadays
we have quoting with DEL characters.

So I submit that we no longer need these convoluted differences
between the node references in these two contexts, and can now decide
that node names with embedded periods will be quoted in all node
references.  I hope you will agree.