(Sorry for the wide distribution, but I wasn't sure who would be
affected, and wanted to seek advice.)
Eric Blake from m4 (thanks Eric) asked about the coding standards:
And since dvi et. al are not invoked by 'make all', it is not
obvious whether 'make install-dvi' should depend on dvi or be a
no-op if the user didn't first do 'make dvi'.
I am inclined to say that install-DOCFMT should depend on DOCFMT. Does
that sound ok? ... Analogous to `install' depending on `all'. (Doesn't
it?) It seems that latter dependency is only implicitly stated in the
standards, but maybe that is ok.
Eric also pointed out a possible discrepancy in the coding standards
saying that not all documentation formats need be supported:
http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Directory-Variables
states that for htmldir, dvidir, pdfdir, psdir, "(It is not required to
support documentation in all these formats.)".
I am not sure why that caveat is present. Does anyone see a problem
with simply removing the parenthetical? I think in practice it will not
make a difference; there is no suggestion that these formats should be
included in distributions, or built by default, or anything like that.
One more related point from Eric:
dvi, html, pdf, and ps are also listed as standard make targets, but
with a caveat "Generate documentation files in the given format, if
possible."
In this case, I think the caveat is ok. I can imagine some (unusual)
manual not making sense in, say, DVI format, because it makes extensive
use of hyperlinks or something.
Thoughts?
Thanks,
Karl
