Question

As part of the build I’m processing DocBook file that produces multiple HTML files (one file per chapter).

I want to postprocess those HTML files and copy them elsewhere. Those files depend on DocBook source, but I cannot know filenames in advance (filenames depend on DocBook source too).

I’ve got rule that sort-of works if the files are generated already:

www/manual/%.html: build/manual/%.html
   postprocess "$<" "$@"

but I don’t know how to tell make to generate them, if they aren’t there yet. If I just add rule for www/manual/index.html, only that file gets postprocessed, not all of them.

I suppose I need makedepend for DocBook or perhaps some nifty wildcard trick. What’s the solution for this?

Answer 1

I’m going to blindly assume GNU Make here; if not, similar techniques should apply with slightly altered syntax.

If it were me, I’d use a rule akin to yours above, possibly with a file list generated by the wildcard function

And then I’d put that rule in a separate sub-makefile, called recursively

That is, in your main Makefile,

  build:
    # do the docbook processing
    $(MAKE) -f htmlprocessmakefile

That Makefile will see the full list of HTML files that have been created.