This document describes how the Installation Guide gets built for the
official www.debian.org website.

For each Debian release a version of the Installation Guide (manual) is
available at: http://www.debian.org/releases/<codename>/installmanual.

Currently, builds for the website are triggered automatically when a new
version of the installation-guide package is uploaded.
There are separate builds for "testing", "stable", and "oldstable".
The build for testing is triggered by uploads to unstable, while builds
for stable and oldstable are triggered by uploads to stable resp. oldstable.
The builds take place on the www-master server which is maintained by the
website admins.

The checks for new package versions are done by the 'lessoften' script.
This will fetch the source tarball for the new version, extract that and
then calls the build/buildweb.sh script. The latter script uses the same
lists from the debian dir to determine valid architectures and languages.
After the build has been completed, the lessoften script will move the
generated files into the correct place for the website and its mirrors.

Relevant logs for the build are available at:
http://www-master.debian.org/build-logs/webwml/lessoften.log
http://www-master.debian.org/build-logs/webwml/installmanual/

The table with available architectures/languages that is included on
http://www.debian.org/releases/<codename>/installmanual is defined in
the VCS for the website itself (currently
https://salsa.debian.org/webmaster-team/webwml).
The relevant files are:
- english/releases/<codename>/installmanual.wml
- english/releases/<codename>/release.data

The second file contains the list of architectures (%arches; shared with
the Release Notes) and languages (%langsinstall) to include in the table
and may need to be updated after an upload.

The direct links to the variants for the individual architectures
(http://www.debian.org/releases/<codename>/installmanual/<arch>) support
content negitiation to determine the default language to be shown to a
particular user (based on his browser settings).

This means that it is very important that, if a translation is dropped
(i.e. if the language was enabled in the previous upload, but is disabled
or removed in the current upload), the old files for that language are
removed from the webserver. This does not happen automatically, but must
be done by sending a request to remove the files to the website admins.

If this does not happen, some users may still be presented with the old
version of the manual.

---
Changelog:

2022-02-13 Holger Wansing
Update to current situation regarding build for the website:
	- now builds for different suites
	- update VCS path

2008-11-08 Frans Pop
Initial version