Hi Stefano and all -- back on your report about broken urls from 2011 :) --
Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 22:03:50 +0100 Feeding the address of the on-line automake manual: <http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/automake.html> to the W3C linkchecker: <http://validator.w3.org/checklink> I've found the following *broken links*: <http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/tar.html> ... The particular urls you found at that time (all are GNU manuals) are not a problem any more, due to the Texinfo htmlxref feature we invented to handle references from one Texinfo manual to another. (Doc on that, for the record: https://gnu.org/s/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/HTML-Xref-Configuration.html Current xref file: http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/texinfo/htmlxref.cnf) So that is all fine. However, I took the opportunity to rerun checklink on a single-file automake.html (make AM_MAKEINFOHTMLFLAGS="--no-headers --no-split" html) and found plenty of other problematic links in the manual (surprisingly, there were none in automake-history.html). I then made a few small changes to the W3C checklink script to eliminate useless warnings and make exclude maintenance more convenience, and called the resulting file checklinkx for (I hope) clarity. (Mostly I did this because I hope to reuse this work for other documents and web pages I maintain.) The attached patch.gz fixes the urls in automake.texi, adds checklinkx to the contrib/ subdirectory, and a new target in doc/local.mk to invoke it for rechecking. Here's the ChangeLog entry I've got so far, for convenience. Comments/criticisms/suggestions/whatever? --karl (With thanks to Jim for pre-reviewing this work and already suggesting plenty of good improvements.) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [PATCH] doc: update urls in manual and include checklinkx script. * doc/automake.texi: update many urls; http -> https, search.cpan.org -> metacpan.org/pod/distribution, node names, etc. Remove sourceware.org/cgi-bin/gnatsweb.pl and miller.emu.id.au/pmiller/books/rmch/ as these are 404 and no good replacement is evident. s/perl/Perl/ a couple times in text for good measure. * contrib/checklinkx: new script, a small modification of W3C checklink <https://validator.w3.org/checklink/docs/checklink.html> (W3C license, which is free software), starting from version 4.81 installed from CPAN: https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/W3C-LinkChecker/bin/checklink.pod * doc/local.mk (checklinkx): new target to invoke it, with variables. * Makefile.am (EXTRA_DIST): distribute it.
checklinkx.diff.gz
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