Re: Texinfo 7.0 changed the name of HTML output directory

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2024 14:15:17 +0200
> From: Patrice Dumas <pertusus@free.fr>
> 
> On Sun, Aug 25, 2024 at 11:32:01AM +0100, Gavin Smith wrote:
> > 
> > This is a hack but may be the best way at the moment.  I think we
> > should have a better way of supporting this if there isn't one already.
> > We should at least support the "XDG Base Directory Specification".
> 
> I can work on that.  Should it be done before or after the release?
> 
> I think that adding the manual source directory could be done before the
> release as it is not a big change.

As you discuss the various changes and improvements to this, please
consider one additional aspect: it is quite reasonable for a project
to have cross-references to other manuals, which are not necessarily
of interest for the GNU Project, at least not enough to have that
referent manual in htmlxref.cnf.

A case in point is the Eshell manual (part of the Emacs suite of
manuals), which in a couple of places has a cross-reference to the
manual of zsh.  Now, zsh is not a GNU project, and there's no reason
to have the URL of its manual in htmlxref.cnf.  Likewise, there could
be other manuals that are referenced by some GNU project in its
manual, but are otherwise not interesting to the other projects, not
enough to have them in the official Texinfo htmlxref.cnf.  Because if
we decide that any and every referent manual must be in htmlxref.cnf,
we will eventually have a lot of stuff there that is hardly of
interest, and keeping track on all of them to have them up-to-date
could be a significant burden.

So maybe we need two such files: one maintained by Texinfo, where only
GNU manuals are mentioned, the other local to a project, where the
project could augment the Texinfo-maintained file with additions that
are of interest only to that project.

Yes, I know that this should already be possible, but at least the
Texinfo manual should mention this.  E.g., currently the Texinfo
manual asks for every update to the file to be reported to the Texinfo
developers, but that makes little sense for such "project-specific"
external references.  Maybe this project-local file should also be
named differently, I don't know.