Re: [AUCTeX-devel] Cross-manual HTML hyperlinks...

[Ralf Angeli]

* David Kastrup (2006-11-13) writes:

> if one takes a look at
> <URL:http://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/preview-manual/html_node/Installation.html#Installation>
> and tries following the link in this page, one gets a HTML 404 on
> <URL:http://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/preview-manual/auctex/Installation.html#Installation>
>
> Is this somethink we could fix with a symbolic link, or maybe an HTML
> redirection (would this obey the #Installation label?)?
>
> If there is a solution for this problem, it might be worth checking
> for other cross-document hyperlinks in the HTML pages in need of
> fixing.

It seems this is a clash of the assumptions Texinfo is making when
HTML is generated and the way HTML manuals should be generated
according to the GNU software maintainer guidelines (namely with
gendocs.sh).

The Texinfo manual (if Debian users wonder where that went on their
system, it's been split into nonfree) contains these assumptions:

,----[ (info "(texinfo)HTML Xref Link Basics") ]
|   The DIR and FILE parts are more complicated, and depend on the
| relative split/mono nature of both the manual being processed and the
| manual that the cross-reference refers to.  The underlying idea is that
| there is one directory for Texinfo manuals in HTML, and each manual is
| either available as a monolithic file `manual.html', or a split
| subdirectory `manual/*.html'.  Here are the cases:
`----

Instead of "manual.html" they likely mean "<name_of_package>.html",
otherwise the the sentence does not make sense.

But the gendocs.sh script generates a directory containing an
index.html file and html_node directory which is not unique across
multiple manuals.  I haven't seen an option for letting it generate
output for multiple manuals at once.

We could try to mesh the index.html files and make the html_node
directories as well as links to them unique, but that would be a major
PITA.

-- 
Ralf