Re: ifinfo vs ifnottex

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 19 May 2006 21:40:28 -0500 (CDT)
> From: Luc Teirlinck <address@hidden>
> CC: address@hidden, address@hidden
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
>    (Note that the Makefile's currently don't support anything beyond
>    these two formats.)
> 
> I now believe that you meant allowing users to build the HTML manuals
> using something like `make elisp.html' in analogy with `make elisp.dvi'.

Yes.  Or, better, just "make HTML" to produce HTML versions of _all_
the manuals.  And similarly for XML, DocBook, and PDF.

> Since running makeinfo directly is not that difficult, I do not
> believe that the lack of support from the Makefiles is a major
> impediment for generating other output formats.

For someone who has good knowledge of makeinfo, it's not an
impediment.  For others, it is.

Similarly, for someone who knows how to run GCC, it won't be a
problem to compile Emacs by hand, but we still supply special Makefile
targets for that.

Quite a few of other GNU packages have such special targets in their
doc directories, so the idea occurred to others as well.