Re: html cross refs proposal

> An installer may need to override the defaults, for whatever reason, and
> that is fine.  That's why we're inventing the config file in the first
> place.  However, I don't yet see an argument for *multiple* config files.

After some thinking, I can't see either. I was wrong about one thing: (pre)
packaged manuals are not generated after package installation, and thus
won't be able to take advantage of the information about the location
of other packages. This directory for packagers doesn't make sense, sorry.
 
>     I think that we should specify where those manuals should be,
>     relative with the automake/autoconf $prefix, $pkgdatadir and so on.
> 
> I don't think we can do this.  Web sites are often maintained on a
> completely different system than the rest of the software.  If we
> installed them by default in, say, $(datadir)/html, I think it would
> just waste a lot of disk space.

For web sites indeed. But for manuals bundled with software packages ?

> Anyway, the actual installation dir seems like a separate issue to me.
> How does this relate to the default xref targets, which are spelled out
> already in the document? (../manual.html and ../manual/)

It is not totally separated, because we should try to make sure that 
html manuals are installed such that cross refs are right.

My concern arise for the following case:

Imagine ther is a package for foo, with an html manual. If there is no 
rule for manual installation, the manual could be, for example, installed 
in 
/usr/share/doc/foo/foo.html 
There is also the package bar with a manual, installed in
/usr/share/doc/bar/bar.html

In that case the references in foo, to the node mynode in the bar manual 
will be
bar.html#mynode

The ref is not wrong but the manual location are wrong. The foo.html 
and bar.html files should really be installed locally in the same directory. 
That's why I was thinking that we could specify a directory for locally 
installed html manuals, say
$datadir/html/
Similar with how info manuals are installed right now, they are all
installed in a directory, and I believe this is conditioned by a 
$datadir or the like variable ?

Pat
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