On Tue, 17 Feb 2004, Karl Berry wrote: > I am against having separate install targets because GNU makefiles > normally install everything by default and that is what users should > > No, they don't currently install any Texinfo output format except Info. > And I don't see any particular reason why they should. Why install > HTML, when we're not installing XML, Docbook, PS, PDF, or > who-knows-what-else?
What I mean is that 'make install' normally installs everything which is expected to be installed. > Installing everything is not a problem for distribution > maintainers since they decide which files to package using their > distribution tools. > > Not as far as GNU goes. If make install installs HTML, then they have > to provide HTML in the distribution .tar.gz -- exactly analogous to > Info. Otherwise, every *installer* has to have the right version of > makeinfo installed, which is not feasible. This is true/reasonable of the source packages (luckily HTML compresses very well), but there are often several "binary" installable packages offered for a given source package. The user can choose to install a package-doc or package-html install package if they want the extra documentation. The package maintainer decides what the best way is to slice/dice the files in a complete installation in order to offer end-users more freedom as to what occupies their disk space. The package maintainer is very likely to have the right Texinfo available for the job. If the HTML files are not distributed with the sources, then one way to deal with the situation is to have autoconf test for a recent enough texinfo package, and if it is too old, a warning is generated, and texinfo-based processing/targets are skipped. Keep in mind that texinfo is just one method among many (in addition to 'vi') for generating HTML documentation. Presuming that the GNU standards are extended to include HTML, if the user does 'make install' and the package provides HTML, it should be installed if at all possible. Bob ====================================== Bob Friesenhahn [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen