On Fri, 15 Oct 2004, David Berry wrote:
> Peter,
>
> > > Do we not also need some way of hlinking documents as part of "make dist"?
> > > When Bill Joye gets an ast-4.0.tar.gz he will not want to link the docs
> > > himself (he is unlikely to have htx available anyway).
> > >
> > > So should hlink not also be built into the "dist" target in addition to
> > > the "world" target?
> >
> > David, if you have some specialist need like hlinking on dist, then you
> > can use the "dist-hook:" target to add whatever special commands you
> > require.
>
> I wouldn't have classed this as a specialist need. Presumably the whole
> point of the dist target is to send individual components to sites which
> do not have the whole collection (and thus may not have htx) installed. So
> how are poeple receiving these distributions going to link the docs?
>
> If it's appropriate for AST then I would have thought it's appropriate for
> the "dist" target of all components.
OK, thinking about this a little more, perhaps it's Star2HTML that is now
mis-configured.
The underlying assumption about what it does is that it's better to rely
on local documents and if you want to go off site, you'd better have made
that clear (which is why hlink is essential at some stage after creating
the document).
Perhaps we should change Star2HTML so that all newly created documents all
point their cross-references to the RAL document set instead, and then you
run hlink when you (to quote Norman) have a HTX clue and prefer to use the
local documents when they are available. In which case hlink becomes a
non-essential post-install task, assuming you have good network access
(that wasn't the case when Star2HTML and HTX were conceived).
Under this scheme hlinking is a specialist AST job, as it has two
documents that want to refer to each other locally.
Anyone any bad comments about this idea?
Peter.
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