[Doc-SIG] auto-numbered footnote resolution

[Tony J Ibbs (Tibs)]

David Goodger wrote:
> I'm re-examining (for validity) what I wrote in the spec:
>
>  Automatic footnote numbering may not be mixed with manual footnote
>  numbering; it would cause numbering and referencing conflicts.
>
> Would such mixing inevitably cause conflicts? We could
> probably work around potential conflicts with a decent
> algorithm. Should we?

Well, I read that paragraph in the documentation, and decided that it
was in the category of "don't, in practice, care" so far as I was
concerned. This is the same category I put the forbidding of nested
inline markup - quite clearly one *can* do it, but equally clearly it's
a pain to implement, and not a terribly great gain, all things
considered.

It's a category with the subtext "examine for correctness after we've
had some experience of people *using* reST in the wild".

Thus, given there are lots of other things to do, I would tend to leave
it as-is (especially if you are able to *warn* people about it if they
do it by mistake).

To my mind, being able to do ``[#thing]_`` probably give people enough
precision over footnotes whils still allowing autonumbering - the *only*
potential problem is when referring to a footnote in a different
document (and that, again, is something I would leave fallow for the
moment, although we know I tend to want to use roles as annotation for
that sort of thing).

Tibs

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