Bug#873456: Bug#879048: Bug#876075: Anchors are non-unique in the single-HTML version

Hello Bill,

On Sun, Jun 10 2018, Bill Allombert wrote:

> The policy-1.html has the nice property that it is easy to search the
> whole document.

Yes, this was actually the main reason I pushed to use singlehtml as the
default on the web mirrors when we switched to Sphinx.

People on their own computers can install the debian-policy package and
search policy.txt.gz with Emacs or zless or similar.

On Sun, Jun 10 2018, Bill Allombert wrote:

> Maybe it sound harsher than what I wanted to say.  I have no problem
> with policy-1.html to be dropped as a stop-gap measure. However this
> is not a good long term solution. If sphynx cannot do it then we
> should consider a better technology.

Indeed, it would be better to ship a quality policy-1.html than not ship
one.  However, I don't share your optimism that we will find a
technology that will generate a good policy-1.html without having
various other disadvantages when compared with Sphinx.

So while I agree that after dropping policy-1.html we should have a bug
"restore single file HTML format", I think it should be of wishlist
severity, because the only reasonable expectation is that we won't have
policy-1.html until Sphinx has better support for generating it.

(Also, the other bugs should be closed when policy-1.html is dropped
because they are strictly invalid when the policy-1.html file does not
exist in the package.  Instead, in the wishlist bug, we can note the
reasons for removal.)