DOCBOOK: generating DocBook Makefile autodeps

["Matt G." <matt_g_ at hotmail dot com>]

I use makefiles (with GNU Make, of course) to build my XML DocBook 
documents.  Parts of them (external entities) are automatically generated.  
This means that, as I make changes to the source, from which these document 
fragments are derived, or when I update changes made by others (through CVS, 
a source/revision control system facilitating concurrent development), the 
affected documents must get rebuilt.  Currently, I codify the dependencies 
manually, though this is quickly growing into a tedious, error-prone chore.

To solve this problem, GNU Make has some special features for automatically 
generating makefile fragments, which can be included in a second pass of the 
makefile that generated them.  This is the mechanism I use to generate 
(along with a special mode of gcc's cpp, which enumerates the tree of files 
that are included by a source file and any of the files it includes or the 
ones they include, etc.) autodeps for C/C++ code.

It was always my intention to do something similar w/ XML DocBook.  This 
would require writing a tool to enumerate dependencies resulting from use of 
external entities and the DTD, as well as any DocBook-specific mechanisms 
for referencing external files.

While I don't mind doing this, I thought I'd check to see if anyone is aware 
of such an autodep tool, for XML DocBook or generally just XML.  If the 
latter case, it should have hooks to extend to new vocabularies that refer 
to external files by means other than entity references - being able to 
specify a list of XPath expressions, which indicate CDATA or PCDATA nodes to 
be interpreted as system identifiers, might suffice.

Anyhow, if I do end up having to write the above tool, I'll probably post it 
on a related SourceForge project I've got, and send a link to this list.  
It'll be GPL'd.


Matt Gruenke


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