I attached the whole diff, but I wish to split it into several elementary steps.
Sounds good. 1) the first step is that tex4ht-dir.tex is renamed to tex4ht-dir.m4 and made a script, and the Makefile generates the texh4t-dir.tex from this m4 file. This way directory information is not duplicated in serval places, and lies only in the Makefile. Ok, I committed tex4ht-dir.m4 and your changes to the Makefile (r716). With a couple of changes. First, I removed the dependency on xtpipes.jar since the .java files aren't yet created in the right place, so they don't get compiled. Also, the javac option is -sourcepath not --source-path, at least on my (CentOS) system. Also, this change seemed spurious so I left it out: - $(update) tex4ht.env-unix $(dest_base)/unix/tex4ht.env + $(update) tex4ht.$env-unix $(dest_base)/unix/tex4ht.env Because there are several different objectives that should be each in a different change. Next ... can you please send separate diffs for the following steps? Ideally with ChangeLog entries so I don't have to write them. We may as well skip the evidently-premature optimization of \MakeDir for now. OTOH, please ensure that all cd and push commands are protected against failure, as in: cd somedir || exit 1 pushd somedir || exit 1 Eitan did not bother with this, and as a result things are often executed in the wrong directory ... --thanks, karl.