Emacs Flaw: Dead Info Node in Manual (2009)

This page is a short note about emacs manual's node's persistence across manual versions.

2 issues are noted here:

• (1) Emacs Lisp function Info-copy-current-node-name changed its output slightly, between emacs 22 and emacs 23.
• (2) Emacs manual node entries are not persistent across manual versions, this creates a problem of “bad link” references in existing literature.

Emacs 23 (date 2009-07)

info-copy-current-node-name

In emacs 22, when in info inside emacs, if i press c (Info-copy-current-node-name), i get the node name in my kill ring (aka clip board), for example:

(elisp)System Environment

But in emacs 23, i get:

(elisp) System Environment

This change is not documented in the emacs 23 release notes (aka NEWS file).

This change actually broke one of my personal elisp command. My command turns a line of the form:

(emacs)dired

into

<span class="ref">(info "(emacs)dired")</span>

Note: This is a trivial issue. My command can be trivially fixed. This change did not break backward compatibility with emacs 22. I've tested, that in emacs 22, the function info works correctly regardless if there's this extra space in the argument.

Info Node Persistency

A more important issue i just discovered is that some info node in emacs 22 are gone in emacs 23.

In emacs 22, there's this node:

(info "(emacs)Transient Mark")

but it does not exist in Emacs 23 (date 2009-07) manual.

Shouldn't the manual nodes be persistent across versions, for example, providing redirect when node changed?

As a practical matter, this means now i have to search my emacs publications to fix the nodes. A task that's not particularly trivial. This applies to any publication on emacs that reference to the manual by node.

This is a problem with Python's documentation too. thinking about this, actually i don't know if there are any manual that:

• (1) Provide a computable reference to the chapter/sections.
• (2) Maintain this on different versions of the manual.

However, since emacs does (1) already, it's easy to do (2) too.

Just noticed, there was a manual page (info "(emacs) Mac Input") , but it seems gone in emacs manual for GNU Emacs version 23.2.

The page discuss variables like mac-option-modifier, mac-command-modifier, mac-control-modifier.