RFC: htdocs/multimedia improvements

[Gabor Kovesdan]

Hi,

I've heard complaints from other doc developers about the multimedia
section because of the build process and I'm not very satisfied with the
current solution either. It takes lots of time to build and if you run
make all in htdocs/ it is always built whether there is any change in
the corresponding files or not. Besides, the build process is quite
messy. It is generated with an ad-hoc perl scripts and probably noone
knows how it exactly work except the original author.

My proposed improvement uses much simpler XSLT stylesheets to generate
the output and they don't any more generate per-tag and per-source pages
but a single page with tags that contains the tag cloud and per-tag
sections and a single page for sources that contains a source list and
per-source sections. In this way we can eliminate generating and
installing gazillions of files. I estimate that this approach is fine,
since the number of multimedia items aren't growing quickly and even if
they grow, it's quite common that older items become unavailable or
simply outdated. And nowadays the bandwidth isn't such a bottleneck any
more as it used to be. But in case we need per-tag and per-source pages,
now it is much easier to modify the XSLT templates to do that. And this
solution drastically reduces the build time and files are only rebuilt
if there's a change in the source files.

The patch is here:
kovesdan.org/patches/multimedia.diff

And here's a rendered version:
http://kovesdan.org/webtest/data/multimedia/multimedia.html

Gabor