Re: Volta enhancements tranche 1 (issue 6398055)

[Graham Percival]

On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 12:24:06PM +0200, David Kastrup wrote:
> Again: I don't see that Texinfo behavior precludes us from writing
> consistent input.  Mapping this input to current Texinfo behavior is a
> matter of redefining a macro then.

I don't see how this can be done with a macro, but I'm quite
willing to believe that I don't know enough texinfo.  AFAIK
  @cindex \foo
adds "\foo" to the index.  Is there any way we could write
  @cindex \foo foo
to mean "sort this in location 'foo', but print out '\foo'" ?  or
even better, automatically redefine
  @cindex \foo
to remove any backslash from the sort-order but still print the
backslash?

> Looking at the Texinfo source, it would appear that the main makeinfo
> engine uses the locale-aware system sorting routines, so it is
> conceivable that calling Texinfo with a suitable LC_COLLATE setting
> might do the trick on systems having locales supporting this kind of
> order.

... no clue what LC_COLLATE is.

Anyway, if you can produce a proof-of-concept demonstration of
\foo being sorted in any index without the backslash, then I'll
gladly organize a policy discussion on exactly how we want to
write the index entries, and exactly how we want the index(es) to
look.

- Graham