Re: Online Emacs Manuals at gnu.org

[Yavor Doganov <yavor@gnu.org>]

Richard Stallman wrote:
> 
> We need to put in more statements saying "You can buy nice printed
> copies from the FSF.  This supports FSF activities."  

Sure, but why don't we put it in the gendocs template -- thus every
generated index page will have it.  Of course, not all manuals are
available in printed form, but still it is going to have a positive
effect, I believe.  Karl, what do you think?

> You are welcome to update the Emacs manuals on www.gnu.org, but I
> thought the webmasters didn't want to take on such responsibilities.

Anything under /software is maintainers' territory; some maintainers
do not want random people do edit their pages (and that's
understandable).  We can't manitain every single page because we don't
have the human resources (the www tree is currently ~300 MB, without
/software), but we offer our help in some cases.

For the Emacs manuals particularly, Karl wanted to make some
beautifying of the layout.  We also plan to begin something like a
campaign for the unification of the locations of all GNU manuals, for
better maintainability of gnu.org/manual and the inter-manual links.

Chong Yidong wrote:
> 
> Sure.  I've uploaded added the secondary manuals to manual/html_mono
> and manual/html_node.

Thanks!

> In order to get the links to work properly without lots of symlink
> hacking, I had to move the existing manual files around so that they
> are where "makeinfo --html" expects.  Thus, the "entirely on one
> webpage" version of the emacs manual is now in
> manual/html_mono/emacs.html instead of manual/emacs.html, the index
> page for the Emacs manual has been moved from manual/index.html to
> manual/emacs.html, and the elisp manual has also been merged into the
> manual/ tree.

I think this is what we intended to do, if I'm not wrong.

> I have tried to update the symlinks by editing the .symlink files, but
> this does not seem to have any effect.

It takes 24 hours for the changes to take effect.

> Is there anything else I need to do to make them take effect?  

No, only patience.  If it does not work afterwards, the Savannah
hackers should know the reason and the way to rectify the problem.