having trouble making changes to the handbook

[Benjamin Kaduk]

On Sat, May 20, 2017 at 09:17:47AM -0400, Ernie Luzar wrote:
> I am following the info in this link
> https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/fdp-primer/
> 
> I installed the textproc/docproj package.
> 
> The above link says that svn is installed as part of that port. But it 
> really is not. Have to use the built in svnlite command.

It seems that
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/head/textproc/docproj/Makefile?revision=420130&view=markup
has some logic to not depend on devel/subversion when
/usr/bin/svnlite is present in the build environment, which is
arguably not the best choice, since the build environment need not
match the install environment when pre-built packages are in use.


> The shown command
>    "svnlite checkout https://svn.FreeBSD.org/doc/head ~/doc"
> downloads far more items than wanted. This needs better example of just 
> downloading the desired language version of the handbook plus any 
> "shared directories" required for "make command" to work. How do I do this?

It is intentionally undocumented, as there are multiple parts from
the root needed to build a translation tree (in addition to the
english sources, which are used when translations do not exist).
No one has gone through to enumrate the list and commit to keeping
it up to date as the build system changes.  That is to say, you are
free to attempt it, but it will require some investigation and it
will probably be simpler overall to just accept the extra bytes as
the cost of convenience.


> I ran the "igor -R filename.xml | less -RS" command on the chapter I 
> wanted to work on before making any changes. To my surprise a bunch of 
> error are shown. Since these error are all already in the handbook 
> source I see no reason why I should try to correct them.

Just because errors are preexisting they should be ignored instead
of fixed?  To be clear, no one is going to insist that you fix all
issues in a file before adding content to it, but it is also a fine
idea to make an initial cleanup patch before starting to do further
work.

As to how this situation might arise, the existing content is often
quite old, and igore is a comparatively new tool (and continues to
receive updates), so it is not surprising that there is old content
that does not fully comply to the current standards.

> When I ran the "make" command the resulting html files are just written 
> into the directory that "make" was run from. How do I tell "make" to 
> write the output to a location of my selection?

'make install' should respect DESTDIR, of course, and I think (but
did not test) that the usual OBJDIR-manipulation variables would
work.

> What is really lacking is a way to view the changed output in a command 
> line browser. Installing a desktop just to view the changed handbook is 
> not an acceptable solution.

But, what would the other location of your selection be that would
be differently viewable in a command-line browser than the html
files in the build tree?  I generally use a browser (desktop or not)
to view the html files next to the xml sources, which is usually
"good enough" for what I need to do.

-Ben