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

[Douglas Silas]

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