html texinfo install?

[Karl Berry]

Hi folks,

Patrice Dumas and I have been working out a plan to make cross-manual
xrefs work in any Texinfo HTML output, so texi2html and makeinfo can
work together.

In order to make this most useful for people to browse manuals locally
(with file://localhost), it seems it might finally be time to propose a
standard directory for HTML output from Texinfo manuals.

The obvious directory would be $(datadir)/html by analogy with
$(datadir)/info, but it seems a bit arrogant to use such a generic name
for something which only relates to Texinfo manuals.  Maybe texinfo/html
-- then we could have texinfo/xml/ and texinfo/docbook/ and ..., if we
liked.  Thus:
texinfodata = $(datadir)/texinfo
texinfohtml = $(texinfodata)/html

Since what Autoconf does will influence more distributions than
everything else put together, I wanted to bring this up with you first.
If you-all think it's a good idea and once we agree on the details, I
can propose the coding standards change to rms.


Also, I'm not sure if make all should make them and make install should
install them by default.  I'm inclined to say no, because including the
HTML in the distributions (which would be the implication) seems like a
lot of bloat, and I haven't exactly been flooded with complaints on the
subject.  Alexandre suggested separate make [un]install-texinfohtml
targets, which sounds fine to me.

Reactions?


Thanks,
karl