[GRASS-dev] Autoconf 2.13

[Glynn Clements]

Hamish wrote:

> > There were also a lot of improvements and tidying recently with
> > regard to making parallel builds work and stopping needless
> > regeneration of HTML documentation on every compile.
> 
> re. "stopping needless regeneration of HTML documentation on every
> compile":
> 
> I am still not happy with the current solution. For example:
> 
> 
> # help page updated from 2 days ago
> $ cd vector/v.extract
> $ svn up
> U    description.html
> Updated to revision 29941.
> $ make
> [...]
> make[2]:
> `/usr/local/src/grass/svn/grass63/dist.i686-pc-linux-gnu/docs/html/v.extract.html'
> is up to date.
> [...]
> (& the help page is not updated)
> 
> No, v.extract.html is not up to date. Only the top --html-description
> part is up to date.

> Changes to either the module's G_parser() definition or
> description.html should trigger a rebuild of the help page, somehow.

The main problem is that not all modules have a description.html file,
so making description.html a prerequisite for .html files will result
in an error for those modules which don't have them.

We could manually add a dependency line for every module, which makes
either description.html or <module>.html a prerequisite, depending
upon which one the module has.

Or we could rename all description.html files to <module>.html (you
can't do the reverse, as that won't work where we have multiple
modules in a directory).

I'd prefer the latter, but the change has to be universal (i.e. no
exceptions) before we can add the <module>.html file as a prerequisite
to the rules in Html.make.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>