[publican-list] [Bug 616142] New: RFC: building only part of a book by altering xrefs

[Darrin Mison]

Actually I would like this feature for a different usecase: debugging.

It's useful to be able to comment out includes from the root document
xml to quickly narrow down the source of the problem, but with projects
that have lots of xrefs it's a nightmare.



On Tue, 2010-07-27 at 02:11 +0200, Douglas Silas wrote:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=616142
> 
> I have a request for consideration for a controversial feature that 
> has two
> important and related use cases:
> 
> * I have a very large book to publish, but due to (various) reasons, 
> only want
> to publish part of it. The content is all interlinked with xrefs, 
> though, so I
> cannot build the book unless I manually change all of them.
> 
> * I am working on a single chapter of a very large book that takes 
> up to 2
> minutes or more to build (with publican 1/2+, which is still a huge
> improvement), and to view my work (to review as a draft, or to check the
> formatting), I would like to build a single chapter. However, due to 
> the rigor
> inherited by xrefs, I cannot.
> 
> The best (and completely hypothetical) solution for these cases 
> would be if
> xrefs were more like xi:includes:
> 
> For more information about firewalls, refer to <xref>
>    <linkend>some_unique_id</linkend>
>    <fallback>the <citetitle pubwork="section">Firewalls</citetitle> 
> section of
> the Red Hat Enterprise Linux <citetitle>Security
> Guide</citetitle>.</fallback></xref>
> 
> I suppose technically that the mix of inline and block-level 
> elements there
> wouldn't work, but that's the idea.
> 
> In lieu of such a useful construct, I am wondering if:
> 
> * there is any interest on behalf of others in building only part of 
> a book;
> 
> * there are any suggestions for what to replace xrefs to nonexistent 
> targets
> with; and,
> 
> * this is a good idea or a bad one.
> 
> This feature could be abused by users saying, "Well, if the book 
> doesn't build
> because of broken xrefs, just turn on directive ignore_xrefs in 
> publican.cfg."
> If this were a feature, publican could warn that it converted 
> linkends A, B and
> C in X and Y chapters into ____ elements. Perhaps this could be a 
> feature that
> could only be enabled on the command line, and thus could not set 
> for entire
> books. I think its utility is undeniable, though, as it would save 
> many of us
> time and effort. I currently cannot publish completed chapters of an 
> overall
> 500+ page book I am editing (that is interlinked heavily with xrefs) 
> without
> either changing all the xrefs manually in a publication branch, or 
> writing a
> hack of a script that replaces these xrefs with <remark>s or some other
> element. I've done the latter out of necessity, but it is almost 
> certainly
> better if this problem is discussed on the list, where we could 
> perhaps come up
> with a single band-aid instead of many individual ones :-)
> 
> -- 
> Douglas Silas
> Technical Writer | Red Hat, Inc.
> Purkyňova 99 | Brno, Czech Republic
> Office Direct Dial—62116
> Brno Office—(+420) 532 294 111 ext. 10718
> 
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