non-standard Makefile - possibly ok for web sites but not good for books #1
Description
I'm reporting this as an issue because I think it the current setup might eventually cause problems for both of us.
When working with Sphinx, the sphinx-quickstart generates a very clean Makefile that is designed to support the different build products (HTML, PDF, ePub, etc.) We already demonstrated that we can add the sphinx-book-theme to the UnoAPI.org project, which uses a completely standard Sphinx build process. It is actually trivial to have your own make rules for things we want to do (e.g. create-dev and serve) by having two makefiles and using the -C option to invoke the other one (e.g. the Sphinx one).
Given that we are also creating a Sphinx site for the COMP 501 course, I hope that we are being mindful of the fact that the build target is not just HTML but should also support PDF and eBook formats, which students actually do use -- at least in my experience.
To summarize my specific concern: The current Makefile supports HTML only. And it writes to build instead of build/html. But what if someone wants to make a PDF version of their personal web site available? I can see myself in the category of people who might, even though it is not presently in the works. All of my other Sphinx projects expect to generate both HTML and PDF outputs.
I am happy to demonstrate this on my own repo and issue a PR but wanted to share my thinking with you with the hope that we will avoid ad hoc practices when the community has already done a great job to make a general solution.