[Aptitude-devel] [merge-request] doc/ infrastructure improvements

[Samuel Bronson]

Dear Aptitude developers,

I made some changes to the build system for you, which you can see at:

    https://github.com/SamB/aptitude/compare/master...doc-infrastructure

The most significant change is to make it possible to build the docs
without installing all of the build-deps. I did this by giving the
doc/ tree its own configure script (which is automatically run by the
top-level configure script); I tried to somehow base it on the
--disable-aptitude switch to the top-level configure script, but
automake didn't seem to like having most of the configure.ac inside of
an "if", so I figured this was simpler.

I also rewrote autogen.sh to about two lines of code (it was either
that or almost-double it), told automake to stop demanding ChangeLogs
and adding useless INSTALL files, removed a lot of cruft from
.gitignore (ChangeLog, INSTALL, and a bunch of redundant entries), and
switched some DocBook DTD/stylesheet references to use the canonical
URLs instead of hard-coding local filesystem paths[1]. Oh, and I added
an autoconf check for rsvg-convert, and conditionalized recursion into
the po4a-based doc/ subdirectories based on whether or not po4a was
found.


[1]: This might sound alarming, but rest assured that this is actually
perfectly safe thanks to the magic of Catalog Files, which any system
with docbook-xml and docbook-xsl installed and properly configured can
consult to turn these URLs into filesystem paths, regardless of
*where* they happen to be installed -- even on non-Debian systems!
For more on this, see <http://xmlsoft.org/catalog.html> and/or
<http://xml.apache.org/commons/components/resolver/resolver-article.html>.

(Of course, the DTD references could already be looked up in the
catalog files provided with docbook-xml, because they already included
the PUBLIC identifier. The main advantage of switching to the
canonical URLs *there* is that it allows such things as opening the
files in a web browser over HTTP; few web browsers have what it takes
to find DocBook DTDs based on just PUBLIC identifiers.)