Tree implosion
PerlPointCD uses a special directory structure to configure the CD. Talk types, author names and talk titles are set up by directory names. While this is convenient and makes maintenance easy, the resulting directory names can become very long and might contain special characters. Not all file systems support this. At least not the ISO file system which is used on CDs.
More, if the CD content shall be provided via web, the resulting URL's might be invalid.
Oops. Can we have both convenience and compatibility? We can.
PerlPointCD can work with both long and short directory names. Short names match the old 8.3 DOS conventions. These names have no meaning, the real information about authors, talks etc. is searched in hidden files. A long name directory tree can be transformed into a short named version by using the make
target implode
. Likewise, explode
restores the long name version.
make implode ... make explode |
Typically these targets do not need to be specified by a PerlPointCD user. The assumption is that the CD is prepared on a modern file system with long name support and that the final version (on CD or on a server) requires to have short names, so make
automatically explodes a tree when producing a preview version (no target or target html
) and automatically implodes it when producing a version for production (target cd
).