Re: Draft approach to split ARIA repository

I agree with Michael that it would be preferable to be able to successfully
build a spec offline.  It would also be nice to run test builds on changes
to common files without first having to push them to master so they show up
at the URL used by other specs.

However, like Michiel I am uneasy about relative links between different
repos.  A repository is supposed to be self-contained.  Among other things,
cross-repo links would break on RawGit (which uses extra nesting in the URL
to denote the current git branch).  And while we won't be as dependent on
RawGit once we get automatically updated master builds pushed to gh-pages,
I do still expect it to be used when sharing proposed changes for
discussion before merging to master.

I'm afraid I don't have a suggestion for solving both problems, but I
wanted to note these issues.

~Amelia

On 6 May 2016 at 09:57, Michael Cooper <cooper@w3.org> wrote:

> On 06/05/2016 11:11 AM, Michiel Bijl wrote:
>
> For references to things in the common repository or other
> repositories, such as scripts and images or links to sections of other
> specs, I'm inclined to suggest we use relative links. They just have to
> point one directory higher than they used to. For me, this makes things
> easier when working offline, but requires having local clones of any other
> repository you need to reference, and assumes the clones are at sibling
> directory levels to each other. Some may say absolute links are preferred
> though, so we may need to debate pros / cons of both approaches.
>
>
> I’d prefer absolute paths because I despise nested repositories.
>
> Maybe we should discuss at the next editors' meeting if you're around for
> that one. I'm curious if you despise nested repositories for an engineering
> reason, or just a preference.
>
> I don't think the proposal to use relative links depends on a nested
> repositories implementation. If the repositories are all stored as sibling
> folders (e.g., <your github clone folder>/w3c/<various ARIA repositories>)
> the relative links should just work, and would work in GitHub online too.
>
> I prefer relative links because I sometimes work on documents offline, and
> load them in a browser to check my work. If the links are absolute, key
> things go missing and it can be hard to check the doc. Of course it's a
> minority of the time I'm in this situation, but often enough I tend to plan
> for it. If the group consensus is to go for absolute links, though, I can
> live with it (with a little grumbling at times I'm working offline...).
>
> Michael
>
>
> —Michiel
>
>
>