Re: [docbook-apps] Automatically detecting which PDFs are affected by changes in a DocBook Git commit

[Stefan Seefeld <stefan@seefeld.name>]

On 26.10.2016 11:04, Bergfrid Skaara wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We use Git to version control our modular DocBook XML code base. I´d
> like to enforce stricter change management than what simply inspecting
> the Git log manually offers. Specifically, I want to trace each
> modular DocBook XML fie that has been changed up to the PDFs that will
> be changed as a result.
>
> Tracing the ancestor files through a sequence of xi:includes is
> trivial. My challenges are:
>
> 1. Profiling. I need to trace ancestor elements taking profiling into
> consideration.
> 2. Entities. We use entities extensively for both aliases and reused
> text. Is there a way to track effects of changed entities without
> starting with a brute force search of all DocBook XML files using that
> entity?
>
> Are there any tools, standalone or add-ons to oXygen, that support
> this or similar behavior, or am I better off writing my own script? In
> case of script, which option is better: XSLT or any scripting language
> facilitating text parsing?

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "change management", and what it is
that you want to enforce, and neither what exactly you want to trace.

Generating a PDF from XML sources typically requires some build logic,
so I think the best you can do is use that very build logic and then
compare (or validate) the generated PDF (or any intermediate formats,
such as FO). That can easily be done in a CI environment (such as
Travis-CI), so you can fully automate that such that the same process is
executed for each push.

        Stefan

-- 

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