An (unfinished) guide to the ac-archive

[Peter Simons]

In case you are interested in the structure of the CVS repositories
and want to know what is what, I put together a small text for you as
an introduction. You can access the repositories through anonymous CVS
from Savannah. (And by the way: If any of you has an login on
Savannah, mail me your user id and I'll add you to the list of
maintainers there, so that you can commit.)

On subversions.gnu.org, there are two CVS repositories:

    /cvsroot/ac-archive/ac-archive
    /webcvs/software/ac-archive

You can browse them on-line from the ac-archive project page, by the
way.

The first repository is owned by me, we can do whatever we wish in
there. It contains the actual macros in both the XML and the legacy
format, plus the copyright statement and a short "read me". Nothing
else. We can commit, erase, and move around anything in there as we
see fit. Note that in the legacy format, the macro's category is
determined by the directory it is located in, while in the XML format,
this information is contained in the file itself, so we can keep them
in any directory structure we want.

The second repository is owned by the GNU folk and we must be very
careful with it, because if anything is messed up in there, we need
support from the Savannah administrators to fix it. It contains the
following:

    C++_Support/
    C_Support/
    Cross_Compilation/
    Installed_Packages/
    Java_Support/
    Miscellaneous/
        These directories contain manually maintained files, which
        say: The macro you are looking for has been moved, bla, bla,
        bla. I keep them because users might have bookmarks to the old
        locations and would not like seeing a simple "page does not
        exist error". These should not be changes as of now; sooner or
        later they will go away.

    index.html
        This is the front page of the archive. It is maintained
        manually. You can change it, add stuff, fix typos, etc. as you
        see fit.

    COPYING
    README
        These files go into the tar.gz archive for the release
        distribution. They are maintained manually.

    autoconf-archive.tar.gz
        This archive is generated automatically. Do not touch.

    dtd/
        Here you will find the DTD of the XML files and some
        unfinished documentation. The contents are generated
        automatically; any changes here will be overwritten anyway.

    htmldoc/
    m4source/
`       These contain the macro's m4 source and documentation respectively.
        Their contents is generated automatically (with the exception
`       of the htmldoc/COPYING.html and htmldoc/ac-archive.css files),
`       so do not touch.

That is all there is right now. New documents for the web server
should go into an appropriate directory, which I will create. Maybe
I'll call it "topics" or something like that.

The tool that generated the site is not publicly available at the
moment, because it is undergoing frequent changes. Documentation on
how it works etc. will be available any time soon.

So just that you find your way around. :-)

Peter