Subject: Re: hello project web page includes libc and autotools manuals?

From: [email-masked] (Karl Berry)
Date: Tue, 25 Oct 2011 23:16:18 GMT

There were several messages on several lists about the crazy url's
relating to cross references from one Texinfo manual to another, like
http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual/emacs/

I've explained this a number of times in a number of places, but
apparently not enough times and not the right places :).

The bad news is that there is no good way to fix this immediately.
We'll just have to keep living with these weird url's, as we have been
for many years already.

The good news is that the next release of Texinfo does fix this in the
right way, such that cross-manual references will end up going to the
real manual, as in
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/etc...

I hope that we will make the first pretest for the next Texinfo within a
few days, perhaps next week.  At that point, it should be feasible to
use it to (re)generate HTML, if nothing else.  It would also be very
helpful testing from my Texinfo-maintainer perspective :).

I've been using the development Texinfo to create the HTML for new
versions of the GNU Coding Standards and Maintainer Information (and of
the latest GNU Hello release), so at least the thing is basically
functional.

Of course, another (ugly) option is to post-process the generated HTML
to change the links.  If anyone cares, I can send the scripts I used to
do that before the new Texinfo was far enough along.

Best,
karl