Chapter 14. The Makefile

An important part of making contributions to the PHP documentation is being able to validate your changes and to be able to see what they will look like in their various forms, whether that is in HTML, Adobe PDF, RTF or other formats.

The Makefile controls serveral aspects of how the documentation is validated and created. To generate a Makefile from a fresh checkout, cd to the phpdoc directory and issue the following commands:

$ autoconf

$ ./configure

This will generate a current Makefile for your copy of the phpdoc tree.

Note: If you are using Windows, these commands only work in the Cygwin bash shell.

Configure has two important options you may use. One is --with-dsssl. Using this option, you can specify the path to the DSSSL stylesheets. There are many (more than 15) directories searched for DSSSL style sheets, so you may not worry about this option. You can specify the used manual language with the --with-lang option. The default is "en". An example on using this option:

$ ./configure --with-lang=nl

There are some more options. The most important are the --with-xsl option to specify the XSL style sheets path, and the --with-zendapi to specify the path to the Zend API documentation.