#2575 Spurious menu at the end of Section 4 of gnuplot.info breaks navigation in info

[Vincent Lefevre]

With gnuplot 5.4.4 under Debian, a spurious menu with a "Bugs" menu item is generated by doc2texi.el at the end of Section 4 (just before Section 5 "Bugs"). This is incorrect and breaks navigation in "info": going backward from Section 5 sends to Section 5.2 instead of the end of Section 4. I've attached a patch that removes the 3 lines responsible for this incorrect menu:

    (search-forward "@node Bugs")       ; `texinfo-all-menus-update' seems
    (beginning-of-line)                 ; to miss this one.  how odd.
    (insert "@menu\n* Bugs::\t\t\t\n@end menu\n\n")

[Vincent Lefevre]

The Debian bug, with the details about this issue: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=989029

[Ethan Merritt]

Thank you for the report, and especially for the patch. I will apply it to both the stable and development branches.

I feel I should mention that to the best of my knowledge no one among the currently active gnuplot developers has been using, testing, or maintaining the process of generating documentation for use by "info". It looks to me that the last serious work on doc2texi.el was done ~10 years ago. I am somewhat surprised to learn that it works at all!

I am currently collecting decision points guiding preparation of the next major gnuplot release (version 6), tentatively envisioned as happening over the next 12 months or so. Given the apparent lack of interest in "info", I had been thinking it would be reasonable to drop any claim of support for "info" and removing those rules from the Makefiles. My perception may be skewed by the absence of related support requests or bug reports via the project issue trackers. If in fact the current make rules for info continue to "just work", then I suppose there is no need to drop them.

[Vincent Lefevre]

FYI, I use the "info" format preferably because I can use it in a text terminal and do a full search on it (which is not possible with split HTML files). And PDF is only very readable on a big 4K screen (or on paper, which has its own issues).