Re: lilypond documentation build issue (both 2.18.2 and 2.19.16)

[Graham Percival]

On Tue, Jul 07, 2015 at 12:22:27PM +0200, Dave Plater wrote:
> On 7/7/15, Dave Plater <address@hidden> wrote:
> >> Oh, there's a pretty big chunk of custom stuff in lilypond
> >> texi2html.  See past discussion here:
> >> https://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=1000
>
> > is this issue likely to be resolved soon or is it as complex as the
> > guile 2.x issue and I'm going to have to create texi packages to build
> > the documentation?
> > See https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=936870

It's not as complex as guile 2.x.  If somebody has basic knowledge
of perl (which isn't hard to acquire) and texinfo (essentially
just knowing it's a doc format with @commands), and is good at
diagnosing and communicating problems, then I would cautiously
estimate 20 hours for this task.  10 hours of investigation and
rewriting by oneself, plus another 10 hours of creating minimal
examples, sending them to the texinfo list to ask for help, then
integrating the solutions into the updated thing.

This could very feasibly be done by somebody new to lilypond
development.

oh, two slight snags:
1) once it was updated to the new texinfo, our build scripts will
probably need some slight adjustment.  That is not do-able by
somebody new to lilypond, but I'd estimate 1 hour from a current
lilypond developer to get that done.

2) it is possible (or even likely) that texinfo will need to be
changed in order for us to do what we want.  I'm certain that if
somebody has a minimal example of the problem, and a compelling
justification for why we want to achieve the desired output, the
texinfo people will be happy to add whatever features or bugfixes
are required in texinfo.  But this *would* add another delay for
being able to build lilypond on a stock distribution with texinfo
5.x.
(that said, if I'm correct about requiring texinfo changes, this
will need to happen at some point so all the more reason to jump
on this now)

- Graham