Re: Automatic Legalese Generator?

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

> Ah. I wish. It would be so cool if we could do this. But currently,
> GNOME is in different places on different systems, all of which doubtless
> fondly believe that they are sticking to the filesystem hierarchy and
> it's all the rest which are in error. For example, I think SuSE sees
> GNOME as an optional package and puts it in /opt. RH uses /usr as 
> the general prefix, and huge amounts of it -- including, of course, 
> the help files -- are architecture-independent: thus on my RH system, 
> the docs are in /usr/share/. So you'll find a lot of GNOME docs which
> refer to $PREFIX/some/path/to/file as a way of getting round "on RH,
> it's here, on Debian, it's here, on SuSE, it's here, on NetBSD, it's
> here, on Solaris, it's here..."
> 
> And I don't think there is a way to get
> <!entity licence.sgml system "$prefix/path/name/file.sgml">
>                               ^^^^^^^
> into the docs, so I think we're stuck :( 

I don't think this should be a problem.  In fact, we will probably
need/want to do an awful lot of this kind of thing since we will probably
want to cross-reference documents a lot.  I believe this can be pretty
easily handled with a thin vfs layer. In fact, I think Jonathan has
already done some work on this.

Really, it looks like the current GHB has a basic vfs layer in it, since
you find your documents not by absolute path, but with things like
"man:ls", "info:cvs", "ghelp:gfloppy", "toc:info", etc.  In this model,
the entity for the licenses might be "license:fdl" or "license:gpl".  The
location of the stylesheet-images might be
"stylesheet-images:gnome/note.png" or stylesheet-images:basic/note.gif".


Dan