Re: HTML-formatted NEWS for Emacs 29

[Stefan Kangas]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2023 12:05:26 +0100 (BST)
>> From: Peter Oliver <p.d.oliver@mavit.org.uk>
>>
>> At https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/news/NEWS.28.html, there’s the Emacs 
>> 29 NEWS formatted as a webpage.  Will there be similar for Emacs 29?  At the 
>> moment, there’s just an Org file at 
>> https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/news/NEWS.29.1, which isn’t as pleasant 
>> to read or as convenient to link to a particular section.
>
> We never had HTML-formatted NEWS file on the Emacs Web page.  There
> are no procedures to produce one that I'm aware of (at least the
> procedure for releasing Emacs, documented in admin/make-tarball.txt,
> doesn't mention that, it only says to copy the NEWS file itself to the
> "webpages" CVS repository, which is then uploaded to the Web server).
>
> According to CVS log, NEWS.28.html was added by Stefan Kangas (CC'ed).
> If Stefan can share the procedure he used to generate that file, and
> if that procedure is practical enough to be added to make-tarball.txt,
> we will follow it from now on.  Alternatively, if Someone wants to
> volunteer to prepare such a file, I will upload it.
>
> (The existing NEWS file for Emacs 29.1, linked from the Emacs Web
> page, is not an Org file, it is the same NEWS file included in the
> Emacs distribution and available in the Git repository.)

The code is already on the emacs-29 branch.  Here are the instructions:

    cd $EMACS_RELEASE_DIR
    ./src/emacs -l admin/admin.el -f make-news-html-file
    mv etc/NEWS.XX.Y.html $EMACS_WEBROOT/news
    cd $EMACS_WEBROOT
    cvs commit -m "Update NEWS.XX.Y.html" news/NEWS.XX.Y.html

Please see `make-news-html-file' in admin/admin.el for more details.

If it is considered useful, we could indeed consider adding these
instructions to admin/make-tarball.txt.