Re: catching broken links on website and documentation

[John Mandereau]

Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Han-Wen reminded me that I've been posting daily reports about broken
> links in our web pages to lilypond-cvs without telling anyone.  
> 
> If you make frequent changes to the web site or documentation,
> subscribing to lilypond-cvs can be informative and helpful.

Speaking of broken links, there is a shitload of broken cross-references
in translated docs, mostly because I didn't take care of them when I
reorganized sections (but I'm probably not the only culprit :-p).

I'm too lazy to fix all this by hand: looking at lilypond.org 404 errors
often doesn't tell you which language the documentation containing the
broken link is; when you look at a link checker output, you must
translate page names back to node names (with spaces <-> dashes mangling
etc.); finally, I haven't found any existing tool to check Texinfo
cross-references in a set of manuals heavily linked to each other, like
we have in LilyPond.

That's why I've been baking for a week an script for checking and
interactively fixing all cross-references, including references between
different manuals, and external references (@ruser, @rlearning, ...)
that should be internal (@ref).  This makes fixing cross-references a
lot faster, I expect this script to save much more time than time spent
to write it.

I'll push to Git as soon as this script is debugged and polished.  I
also want to get all translated docs to compile successfully with
'makeinfo --html': IMO ignoring cross-references errors in translated
docs is no longer acceptable, especially if 2.12 comes out soon ;-)

Cheers,
John