HTML::Tidy and HTML Tidy (tidylib).

HTML Tidy (known hereafter and in general simply as 'Tidy' or 'tidy') is software to clean up and pretty-print HTML/XHTML/XML markup documents.  It includes a library, 'tidylib', and a command-line utility.  See http://tidy.sourceforge.net/.

Building Tidy on various platforms

For MS Windows using ports of GCC and GNU tools

There's been various individual or project initiatives to create build support for compiling Tidy on MS Windows.  One such is residing at this writing at Rick Parsons' site.

I have accomplished the authoring of a GNU make specific makefile that builds and installs tidy on MS Windows using MinGW without any 3^rd-party unix shell.

My pass at this challenge involves using GNU make features heavily to create a makefile which can be used to build & install tidy on both kinds of platforms: the ones with a unix sh shell present, and the ones with only the cmd.exe provided by the MS Windows OS.  There is a include makefile involved which is a library of utility functions I have written to support this slightly-greater-than-usual complexity: Ambidxtr.mk.

This library of make stuff is included via the include directive in the main makefile, which is named makefile.mswincmd to indicate its special ambidextrous abilities to detect and adjust shell commands for the available system command shell.

To use this build support addition to tidy, download the 2 linked files above and save them to the build/gmake subdir in the build tree you have from checking out the cvs tidy source.  Obviously you must use the -f flag with the name of the main makefile and should also use the -I. flag to the make command so that the supplemental included make library is found.

Both of these make files are placed in the public domain; I release all persons of any obligation to worry about my Intellectual Property rights / copyright ownership of these files.  However, I do of course assert that these files being provided free of charge and free of any restriction on use & reuse, are only provided with the understanding that there is no guarantee/warrantee of correctness or usefulness to any user for any purpose.

For MS Windows using non-free OS vendor tools

For non free MS tools there were pending patches available in the SF.Net Bugs queue that add Makefile(s) for VC. Please do not misunderstand, however, and think that I am the least bit interested in using these tools or in supporting those who do.

Checklist of needed additions to the Tidy build process

I'm going to be working on the following enhancements that mostly pertain to ease of building, installation and use of libtidy on Unix-like platforms using free tools.  In any case I will welcome contributions of ideas and especially of code ;-).

• Provide a build-/install- support infrastructure (primarily a Makefile) for building tidy on bare-metal MinGW using the MinGW port of GNU make.
• Have the build process on systems having the sh unix shell create a FOO-config program script that is installed along with the libtidy file(s) so that client software builds can query for the header file locations and other C compiler build parameter switches.

  FOO-config, for the uninitiated, means that the build system for a library creates a sh shell script that can be invoked to give build/install-time info on an installed library.  The FOO stands for whatever the library base name is; in this case, tidy. It is a standard part of releasing Free and Open Source libraries these days to include either the generation of a FOO-config or a pkgconfig data file (or both).

• Make HTML::Tidy test 100% ok when built against the CVS HEAD code instead of failing about 20% of its test suite when built against CVS HEAD.

Last modified: Tue Jun 3 22:39:01 UTC 2008