And this brings us to the point of replacing the unix tools. You are on windows. You can have several GUI CVS clients (tortoisecvs being one of the easiest possibilities), you can install xsltproc with copying some files to the right place, and you already have PHP.
Now if you are working with the PHP documentation you need to install cygwin with all the tools for these commands:
./configure ... make test
You can do everything else out of the cygwin environment more efficiently than you would do on the command line, but make test is a requirement... So you need all the cygwin tools on your machine for these two commands... You will not build the manual on your machine because it takes a long time to complete and there is no point in it actually just building for yourself...
Just for the records ;-) :
validity checking on Windows can be done easily without Cygwin, one can use xmllint, which is available for some time as target make test_xml.
xmllint and xsltproc are available as binaries....;-)
Installed properly in the phpdoc-tools folder xmllint and xsltproc work very well, so AFAICS for proper validity checking cygwin is no requirement.
Khm, just for the records: xmllint might be enough for validity checking *after* you run configure. Since there is no manual.xml file in a CVS checkout, and there are no functions.xml files in the reference subdirs, and there is no entitiy listing refering to files, and there are no "safety files" with missing entities and IDs, you cannot point xmlllint to anything really... My point was that we might need a PHP-based replacement for the tools we use to prepare the manual for building. But I have been voted out so far, which is not a problem, at least I know what to put effort instead (livedocs namely) :))
Goba
