Re: perlpod conversion

[Patrice Dumas]

On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 07:00:16PM -0700, Karl Berry wrote:
>       perl5142delta.pod
>     is a link to perldelta.pod
> 
> Thanks.  I'm omitting *delta anyway :).
> 
>     There are still some issues, one is the incorrect handling of X<> in title
>     bu PullParser, that I reported and will hopefully be fixed.
> 
> I suppose this is the cause of the top-level NAME entries like
> * NAME debug debugger::
> ?  (No biggie, just wondering.)

Exactly, it is this issue.

> I was thinking about putting the Info files, at least, and maybe HTML
> files too, on the GNU web pages somewhere, in case others would find it
> useful.  What do you think?

It would be a bit redundant with http://perldoc.perl.org/, and we won't
have the classification of pages and indices, but why not.  Also in 
perldoc there are the core perl modules documentation, I don't know 
exactly where it comes from, and I am not sure we want to add that too.

Maybe we should wait for the issue above to be fixed in Pod::Simple, 
however?

> As it stands, though, the split-by-whatever HTML can't be generated, e.g.:
> $ perl $txi/tp/texi2any.pl --html --no-warn --no-validate perl_pods.texi
> Could not open
> perl_pods/perldiag-Ambiguous-use-of-_0027s_002f_002fle_002e_002e_002e_0027-resolved-as-_0027s_002f_002f-le_002e_002e_002e_0027_003b-Rewrite-as-_0027s_002f_002fel_0027-if-you-meant-_0027use-locale-rules-and-evaluate-rhs-as-an-expression_0027_002e-In-Perl-5_002e16_002c-it-will-be-resolved-the-other-way.html
> for writing: File name too long
> 
> Maybe it would be worth arbitrarily chopping names at 255 chars.  After
> all, it's not like anyone is going to want to xref to a node name that
> is 300+ chars long, so it's just a matter of getting the run to succeed ...

Well, for many characters we need 5 for one, which is the case above as
there are about 24 special characters, which becomes 120.  Most unicode
characters are transliterated, I don't know exactly what is the mean
number of ascii characters per word (for ideograms, for instance it is
more than one ascii character per ideogram, but at the same time an
ideogram conveys the information of a word, so I guess it is even).
Yet, supposing 18 special characters and 20 words of 7 letters after
transliteration, this gives (7+1)*20 + 18*5 = 250 characters, this is
certainly more than enough.  So, I'd propose chopping names at 250
characters, to leave room for disambiguating counters.

I'll do that.

> The nonsplit HTML is over 7mb, which seems rather excessive.

Why?  I have downloaded perldoc.perl.org/perldoc-html.tar.gz, kept only
the perl*.html files and removed perl*delta.html, and the result seems
to be 12M.  There are a lots of menus in the perldoc output, so it is no
wonder it is bigger of ours.

-- 
Pat