[Mageia-dev] RFC: gtk-doc proposed changes

[Christiaan Welvaart]

On Fri, 22 Jul 2011, Ahmad Samir wrote:

> ATM gtk-doc requires dblatex which requires texlive -> texlive-texmf;
> due to the outrageous size of texlive-texmf, building packages in
> local chroots becomes a bit of pain/burden on my HDD, also each of
> texlive and xmltex have I/O intensive postinstall scriptlets.

The best solution for that may be to put the chroot in a tmpfs.

> I see the texlive-texmf issue is being discussed in another thread so
> I'll keep this one about gtk-doc; here're a couple of points:

Too bad since this appears to be strongly related to the gtk-doc issue you 
mention. I mean, providing a minimal set of texlive packages may fix this 
gtk-doc problem.

> - Some packages have BR gtk-doc but it's redundant:
>  o They don't have --enable-gtk-doc passed to ./configure, which
> means that BR isn't used at all
>  o Most of those packages already bundle html gtk-doc's; is there any
> benefit rebuilding those docs when building the package? or should the
> gtk-doc BR get dropped in such cases (since no one complained about
> those html docs all those years)?

In general I think it's best to generate everything from original sources 
[1]. It makes sure all build scripts/code/documentation is generated using 
the tools in the distro which may be newer and/or have patches compared to 
the tools used to generate the files shipped with the source code. It also 
ensures we can support such packages, because when someone reports a bug 
in a generated file we should never patch that file directly but its 
source.

> - I am thinking of splitting gtk-doc itself, putting gtkdoc-mkpdf in a
> separate sub-package which will require dblatex:
>  o AFAICS dblatex is only used for creating PDF's from XML sources,
> so only useful for gtkdoc-mkpdf

Interesting.

>  o This will result in less HDD grinding due to texlive-texmf and
> xmltex being, unnecessarily, pulled in chroots (either local ones or
> on the BS). Note that for most of the packages I saw,
> --enable-gtk-doc-html is the default (assuming only --enable-gtk-doc
> was passed to configure).
>  o I don't see any packages with pdf gtk-doc documentation:
>  $ urpmf /usr/share/gtk-doc | grep pdf
>
>  gives nothing at all.
>
> So, theoretically, this split shouldn't break any packages (there're
> 144 SRPMS that have BR gtk-doc and 5 -devel packages that require
> gtk-doc). And if any package breaks due to the split, the fix is
> simply adding BR gtk-doc-pdf. Of course we can make it more painful
> and require that those 149 packages get a test build before the split
> is OK'ed...

Maybe we should first set as policy to provide HTML developer 
documentation and not PDFs when there is a choice. Note however that HTML 
docs generated by doxygen can take a lot of space.



     Christiaan


[1] that's why I'd like to ask you not to remove any autoreconf/autotools/etc. 
calls from %build (: