Consider adding a revisionDesc/change element specifying publication location

[martindholmes]

I think it would be useful to have something that looks perhaps like this:

<change who="pers:JENS1" when="2022-12-22" status="published" 
  target="https://lemdo.uvic.ca/moms/emdDEVI3_M.html https://lemdo.uvic.ca/moms_editions/1.0/emdDEVI3_M.html">
 Published in the MoMS anthology.
</change>

If we had this, then any link from another text in another anthology pointing at this document could automatically be converted to a link to the last published version. Note that there are two URLs in there: one is the generic latest-edition URL, and one is the specific edition where the text was published. That would provide flexibility which might be used by the build process or by the person making the reference (if we provide a mechanism for that).

Perhaps "published" is not the status we should use for this: maybe "issued" would be better, signifying that it's not just changing the status, but actually pushing the text to a public site with the rest of its anthology. The change element could be added to the XML file AFTER the release of the anthology, since the actual online version already includes info about the date it was issued in the footer; and it's only after a text has been published that we might reference it in this way.

[martindholmes]

@JanelleJenstad I don't think we've had a proper discussion of this yet, but I still think it's a good idea. The problem of linking to all sorts of texts which are in different anthologies is still unsolved.

[JanelleJenstad]

I think it's a brilliant idea! I totally missed this ticket.

So we'd add a new @status value of "issued" ... and just keep adding links?

[martindholmes]

As of rev 17366, I've added the @target attributes to all of the recently-published Douai texts. This means that any internal link to e.g. "doc:emdDouai_JC_edition" can be resolved to https://lemdo.uvic.ca/douai_editions/1.0/emdDouai_JC_edition.html, creating a meaningful link to the last published version of the text.

The next stage would be to implement such linking in the build process. That would go something like this:

• First, build a map of ids of all published texts to their latest @target location URLs.
• When processing a link to doc:emdXXX, at the lemdo-dev build stage, simply make that a link to the latest version of the text as build at the same time, but if the id appears in the map, add a flag to the link so it can be processed differently at anthology build time.
• When building an anthology, look at each of these flagged links, and if they're links to items which are to be published in the same anthology at the same time, leave them alone; but if they're links to items which aren't included in this anthology, look at the map and transform them into external links.
• If there's a link to an external text which doesn't appear in the map, that means the text has never been published, and that in turn means that the link cannot be published, so an error should be raised.

This would ensure that links within an anthology are always local, but any links to external texts have a legitimate live target that will not disappear.

[martindholmes]

Note that while the <change> element which sets @status to "published" must be added PRIOR to publication, the @target URL should only be added AFTER publication, to ensure that the text actually is there when we try to link to it.

[martindholmes]

I think the remaining implementation of this should wait until we have a genuine use-case; I'm not aware of one at the moment.