Chapter 13. Validating Changes

Now that you have a Makefile, you can validate the documentation changes you have previously made:

$ cd phpdoc
$ make test

Which will generate output similar to this:

touch .manual.xml
CONFIG_FILES=manual.xml CONFIG_HEADERS= ./config.status
creating manual.xml
nsgmls -i lang-en -s ./phpdocxml.dcl manual.xml

If you made a mistake such as forgetting to close a tag or using an invalid tag name, make test will report the error and give you the line number it found it at.

touch .manual.xml
CONFIG_FILES=manual.xml CONFIG_HEADERS= ./config.status
creating manual.xml
nsgmls -i lang-en -s ./phpdocxml.dcl manual.xml
nsgmls:en/functions/strings.xml:54:13:E: end tag for "para" omitted, but OMITTAG NO was specified
make: *** [test] Error 1

In the above example output, the parser expected to see an end tag for <para> at line 54 in the file en/functions/strings.xml. Using this information, you can go back to the file and correct the mistake before committing your changes.

It is important to do a test before commiting, because if you commit files with errors, this single file will cause the automatic build process to halt, and the manual files and downloads wont be updated online. This can make phpdoc people angry.