Re: Concept clash of gendocs.sh and HTML Xref links

[Ralf Angeli]

* Karl Berry (2007-01-04) writes:

>     The advice in HTML Xref links, however, advises to use a single
>     directory for all manuals:
>
> I guess I need to change that somehow.  The idea of that paragraph was
> the (hypothetical) case of trying to build a directory of documentation
> for everything on the system (like $(infodir)), rather than setting up
> per-package web pages.  Since the former is not done in practice, and
> the latter is, I should explain it better.

Well, if you actually have several manuals related to your software
suite and which you want to put online, a setup with all those manuals
below a single directory would make sense.  The guidelines for
maintainers of GNU software propose to use the `manual' directory for
that (see
<URL:http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Web-Pages.html#Web-Pages>).
(This is likely no news for you, but I mention it to be sure it does
not go unnoticed.)

> Patrice Dumas and I worked out a scheme to allow links to external
> manuals to be controlled from a configuration file.  I believe he has
> implemented it in texi2html, but I haven't implemented it in
> makeinfo.  (If anyone would like to tackle this project, let me know!)

Hm, I found something about redefining functions which generate
references (in (info "(texi2html)Reference to external manual")) and
the command line option --html-xref-prefix (in
(info "(texi2html)Style options")) in the documentation for texi2html
1.76, but nothing about a configuration file.  Glancing over the
version of texi2html.texi in CVS didn't reveal anything like that
either.  I'll look a little bit further.

> So I guess using texi2html with an appropriate config file might be
> another option, although I'm not aware of any GNU project which has done
> it that way.

IIUC one currently cannot use gendocs.sh with texi2html.  Perhaps
gendocs.sh only needs some tweaking to generate "named" output for
each manual, i.e. `foo_html_node' instead of `html_node' and
`foo_index.html' instead of `index.html'.  I'll check if this is
feasible for AUCTeX.

Thank you very much for your help.

-- 
Ralf