Publish a manual's archived releases alongside the site

A manual that is released keeps a PDF of each release. Those PDFs belong in version control rather than only on the published branch: that branch is rebuilt by every deploy, and an old PDF cannot be regenerated from current sources. This copies them into the rendered book directory so they deploy with the site, and writes an index page listing them.

Usage

publishManualArchive(
  archiveDir = file.path("archive", "pdf"),
  docsDir,
  manualName,
  subdir = "archive"
)

Arguments

archiveDir

directory holding the archived PDFs, usually tracked in the repository.

docsDir

the rendered book directory, i.e. _bookdown.yml's output_dir.

manualName

name of the manual, used in the index page's headings and link text.

subdir

directory within docsDir to publish into.

Value

path to the index page, invisibly, or NULL if there was nothing to publish.

Details

The index is built from the files actually present, not from a list kept by hand, so it cannot drift. Versions are read from the file names, which are what archiveManualPDF() writes: <prefix>-v<version>.pdf. Anything not matching that shape is copied but left out of the ordering.