Re: using manual_html as output directory for HTML

[Gavin Smith]

On Sat, Feb 5, 2022 at 9:14 AM Patrice Dumas <pertusus@free.fr> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I think that it is not a good thing to have the base manual name, or the
> base manual name with .html prepended as default directory for html
> output, for three reasons:
> * I think that a directory with the manual name should be reserved for
>   other purposes, for example keeping in it include texinfo files,
>   images, init files, CSS files, translations...
> * it does not generalize well to other output formats.
>
> I propose instead to prepend _html to the base manual name, and use
> similar conventions for other (future) split formats.

(I think you mean postpend or suffix with _html, rather than prepend,
e.g. BASE_html not _htmlBASE.)

Using _html would be fine in my opinion for output.

Having a directory called e.g. "texinfo.html" was always a bit odd as
you expect that to be a single file.


> Currently for
> epub, which is a bit special as it is not the final output, which is a
> .epub file, the directory name has _epub_package prepended.
>
> The HTML Xref specification would be modified accordingly.

The URL for a manual is something different. Adding "_html" to the
name of the manual would make the URL worse. If the directory is
output with _html then the files should still be uploaded to the web
server in a directory named after the manual.

I believe it is the gendocs.sh script from Gnulib that is used by many
GNU packages for building web documentation; we should check this
still works with any changes.