On Mon, Feb 03, 2014 at 08:48:06PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote: > Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> writes: > > On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 4:38 PM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > >> guaibasaurus doesn't like this patch: you need to be more careful > >> about links, because the regression instructions are supposed to > >> compile as a standalone document. > > > I wonder if these standalone things are really worthwhile. The whole > > point of this, ten years ago, was that people who were trying to get > > started with PostgreSQL might not have had neither the doc toolchain > > nor convenient Internet access available. Plain text documentation > > was essential for getting off the ground. This seems much less > > relevant today; is the annoyance of not being able to use links > > everywhere really buying us anything at this point? > > That's a very fair question. It's a reasonable bet that pretty much > nobody actually looks at the text versions of either HISTORY or > regress_README anymore. It's conceivable that somebody somewhere makes > use of the text version of INSTALL when trying to get PG going on some > bare-bones platform ... but really, can't they look it up on the net? > How'd they get the PG sources they're installing, anyway?
I sometimes read text-based INSTALL files when building other projects, but a tiny file giving a URL is almost as good. (The other two generated files do seem much less important.) > I'm prepared to believe that these things are just dinosaurs now. > However, at least in the case of the release notes, we'd have to kill them > in all active branches not only HEAD, if we don't want surprises. I wonder how difficult it would be to make sufficient link data available when building the standalone files. There would be no linking per se; we would just need the referent's text fragment emitted where the <xref> tag appears. For example, have a stylesheet that produces a file bearing all link IDs and titles appearing anywhere in the documentation. Let the standalone builds include that file. -- Noah Misch EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
