Richard Stallman wrote: Would someone please look through the Emacs Lisp Manual for nodes that are inconveniently long, and send me a list of nodes you recommend perhaps splitting?
Note that splitting (or renaming) a node is a very disruptive operation, because after doing that many xrefs (as well as hyperlinks from docstrings and Custom buffers) may point to a wrong node (or to nowhere). If one splits or renames a node, one should at the very least carefully grep the lispref and man directories, as well as (for docstrings and Custom buffers) the src directory and the lisp directory and all its subdirectories. There is of course no way to avoid messing up xrefs or hyperlinks in docs not included with the Emacs distribution. We discussed this before and decided then that all the work involved in systematically splitting all large nodes was not worth holding up the release and that, moreover, several of the very largest nodes (including the record holder, `(elisp)Window Frame Parameters', 342 lines), could not be split in any natural way. It would have been relatively better to do this before starting to proofread the Elisp manual, because that way there would have been a better chance of spotting trouble with bad references before they got included with the release. In as far as the recent split of `Minibuf Misc' is concerned, doing M-x find-grep-dired on the `emacs' directory for the old node name and then using the Dired `A' command for the old node name with all potential trouble files marked, turned up two newly incorrect references, which I already corrected in CVS. The reason that there were "only" two was that I already replaced many xrefs to that node with anchors, which are immune to renaming and splitting. Otherwise, there would have been a lot more. Sincerely, Luc. _______________________________________________ Emacs-devel mailing list Emacs-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-devel
