Re: Texinfo 7.0 changed the name of HTML output directory

[Patrice Dumas]

On Sun, Aug 25, 2024 at 12:58:21PM +0100, Gavin Smith wrote:
> I think it makes sense to treat relative paths in a similar way to
> absolute paths.  The only question is whehther the path should be
> relative to current working directory or the source file directory
> (or possibly both).  The current behaviour is to be relative to cwd
> and so that should be kept.

Agreed.  I'll do that change before the release.

> > This is already possible, it is CHECK_HTMLXREF (which is set to 1 in the
> > default case for EPUB as relative paths in EPUB are not possible).
> 
> Good point.  I think we should make CHECK_HTMLXREF=1 the default for
> HTML as otherwise various web manuals will have broken links that nobody
> knows about (we already found a broken link for "eglot", and the link
> for "smtpmail" would have been broken if a newer version of Texinfo had
> been used).

I think that I agree on the principle, but I think that we should
announce it before we make that change, such that people may voice their
concern, and maybe we should do it after the release and not now?

> > We should probably implement the two changes proposed above, to me they
> > are improvements.  But I do not think that they will solve this use case
> > either, if I understood well.
> > 
> > To me, to solve this use case, a natural solution would be the
> > possibility to prepend a directory to the list of directories searched
> > for htmlxref.cnf, such that all the manuals in a project can use the
> > same htmlxref.cnf to override or add to the default htmlxref.cnf.
> > However, this is not possible for now.  For other directory lists, we
> > have this possibility, with -I (and we even have -P) for @include and
> > images and for init files there is --conf-dir.
> 
> If we implemented the XDG specification then the user could use or
> append to XDG_CONFIG_DIRS, which is a colon-separated list of
> directories to search.  However, I am not sure if this is an appropriate
> use of this variable as this is for user- or system-specific configuration,
> but not necessarily for project-specific configuration.
> 
> https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/index.html
> 
> So I suppose we need to devise some other mechanism for this.

I think so too.

> > htmlxref.cnf is searched for in a list of directories that I called
> > @language_config_dirs in texi2any, with the idea that this list of
> > directory could be (at least partly) implementation independent.  For
> > example, if texi2html was still developped, it could use the same search
> > path for htmlxref.cnf files.  For now, this @language_config_dirs list
> > is used for two purposes:
> > 1) to set some paths in the default directories list used for init files,
> >   with init subdirectory prepended.  This corresponds to the path 6 to 9
> >   in 
> > https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texi2any_api/html_node/Loading-Init-Files.html
> > 2) for htmlxref files
> > 
> > We could make this list of directories a customization option, like we
> > currently do with INCLUDE_DIRECTORIES, which is influenced by -P and -I,
> > for example named TEXINFO_LANGUAGE_DIRECTORIES, and add a command line
> > option to prepend to this list?

I think that having a customization option is a good thing in any case,
but I am not sure about a command line option.

> One possiblility is to use --conf-dir to look for htmlxref.cnf files as
> well, although I haven't thought about this deeply.

I am not sure either.  It avoids adding a new option, but this is not
exactly the same type of directory.

-- 
Pat