Re: Please provide stable target anchors

On tor, 2010-07-08 at 20:01 +0100, Daniele Varrazzo wrote:
> I can surely provide you a list, there are just a dozen of them (I'll
> tell you which ones later, now I can't). But then I should bother you
> every time I need a new link, or write a patch for it and wait for it
> to be applied and then for the result to be rendered and published on
> /docs... so I thought generating all of them programmatically would
> improve the docs quality and would be a better solution for the
> future.

Sure, if you have an idea how to do that.

> If you open the manual index [1], scroll down manually to the "PQflush
> " entry and click on the link, you will be redirected on the correct
> page, but at its top. An anchor to be placed on the correct point is
> available (at the time of writing it is [2]) but the index doesn't
> refer to it. It seems a bug.

I think this is a design decision.  The index entries mean, "this topic
is discussed in this section", rather than "this is the line the word is
mentioned".

> For love of consistency I may (try to) write a script to be run once
> which would add an id to all the indexterm (or wherever they should be
> added) based on the "primary" value. There is the possibility that
> this would fix the index bug (the index entry for the sections seem
> correct and they refer to the id), it should be tested. Would it be of
> interest?

I think the index stuff has nothing to do with your actual problem.  You
need to id attributes to the places you link to, or devise a way to
generate stable link anchors in some other way.