Re: Issue 855 in lilypond: fix the command index

[lilypond]

Comment #6 on issue 855 by percival.music.ca: fix the command index
http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=855

"is now a bad time"?  on a personal note, definitely, since I have a bad  
fever, am in pain, and have less patience than normal.  On a project-wide  
note, I think that any new initative should be balanced against the  
time+effort it would detract from the release-oriented-ness.  I'm not  
saying that we should *never* try anything new until 2.14 is out (after  
all, the lilybuntu 3 stuff definitely isn't release-oriented, and has  
definitely postponed 2.14!), but that's the consideration I would be making.


re \foo vs. foo: at least one person complained most voiciferously about  
the suggestion of not including "foo".  He never knew if the thing he was  
looking up was a \text or whether it was just text.  IIRC that happened  
near the end of GDP -- please look up that discussion and give an argument  
about why he was wrong.

re ignore \ in the sorting: this won't be hard.  Just go and talk to the  
texinfo people; I'm sure they'd be willing to give you pointers to the  
relevant part of your code.  Say, 5 hours for a semi-competent C programmer  
with no previous experience with their code base?
admittedly, you might need to do the same thing for texi2html... it kind-of  
depends how far the texi2html+texinfo integration has gone.  Of course,  
this would require either waiting until the next stable texinfo release  
before we can use it, or requiring the use of a cvs-version texinfo in  
order to build our docs.  I don't favor the latter.

re commands in both indices: somebody definitely wanted this.  I didn't add  
it for giggles; it must have been a significant number of users, or one use  
whom I respected.  Try looking at when that was added, then look at the  
mailing list archives for a couple of months prior to that.  Or maybe you  
can find it directly just with a few searches.


Finally, I don't recommend making any major changes to the index  
organization without pretending to ask for opinions on -user.  That way,  
when people complain (and somebody *will* complain), you can point back at  
that discussion and say "see?  people thought it was a good idea".  of  
course, that assumes that the discussion doesn't go complete against you;  
when that happens, you need to wait a few months and the rephrase the  
question so that you get the answer you want.  (woot!  I'm playing Quebec  
referendum politics!)   or just change your mind, of course.

Oh, you could just add a third index, and make them:
  command-index
  concept-index
  unified-index
I wouldn't consider that to be a "major" change, and I can't see anybody  
seriously complaining about that.