Re: [AD] Integrating docs/build in HTML

[Eric Botcazou <ebotcazou@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> Commited then.

Note that you need to patch misc/zipup.sh too, otherwise the distribution 
will ship without any readable build files.

> I dislike this because the pregenerated version would be incomplete
> without the full HTML manual. It's all too interconnected, people
> could start reporting broken readme.txt links when they are just
> exploring it and it could get annoying to tell them that we know the
> main manual is not there and you actually have to build Allegro once.

That's what I suspected.

> Another version of the documentation brings more bloat to an already
> bloated download.  People trying to read HTML documentation before
> installing are likely to read it from the allegro website before
> doing anything at all, which was the main motivation behind the
> patch. Currently we tell them to get Allegro, unpack it and read
> a file inside, which seems a rude beginning to get a few KB of text.

Agreed.

> BTW, is there really somebody using the .txt version of the
> documentation for serious reading? I've always thought of it as a
> 'just-in-case' backup plan, when you are stranded in a corner of
> the world, without internet acces, friends, somehow with a computer
> and electricity but without the courage to open those strange ._tx
> files. A very weird situation.

Yes, I also think of the text version of the docs as a backup plan. But we 
still should support it anyway (which forces us not to write insanely long 
lines in the ._tx files and that's fine).

-- 
Eric Botcazou