Re: [Mingw-cross-env-list] What happened to version numbers?

[Tony Theodore]

On 23/04/2012, at 9:57 PM, Volker Grabsch wrote:
[...]
> 
> Thanks for reading about the backgrounds and design
> decisions up to here! Now, let's get back to the problem
> at hand. :-)

Thanks for such a detailed explanation.

> I'm not happy with the version numbers in index.html,
> either. However, since I wanted the package version numbers
> to show up on the website (and thus in the docs), it was
> just logical to move them from *.mk to index.html the same
> way I move the package websites and other stuff to index.html.
> Although I don't want to go back to generating docs, I see
> some other ways to move the version numbers back to *.mk:
> 
> 1) Don't show the version numbers in the docs, providing
>   a plain package list.
> 
> 2) Show the version number in the package list, but generate
>   it via a small JavaScript snipptet which reads and parses
>   the src/*.mk files.
> 
> Note that 2) would mean we require JavaScript to be enabled
> in the browser. On the other hand, there is a straight, nice
> downgrade path (show everything except version numbers) for
> browsers without JavaScript, so this wouldn't be much of a
> limitation.

I spent some time looking at Jekyll, the github pages templating system, but it 
did look like it was very flexible. I also considered commit hooks to rebuild 
the docs, but that's really overkill.

For a different way to look at it:

    document generation is the primary target of a build

We could set the dependencies in the Makefile so that 

all: doc
doc: $(PKGS)

This way the docs would be updated at the end of every successful build, git 
wouldn't detect unnecessary changes, no-one would notice the few seconds at the 
end, and updates to other parts of index.html can still be done without 
affecting any other part of the build. We'd have up-to-date static docs all the 
time with zero effort.

In the future, it would be nice to have more than a list of packages and 
versions - I'm thinking of extra columns to show the supported targets. This 
would be very difficult to maintain by hand, and is ideally suited to automatic 
generation.

Cheers,

Tony