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

[Ahmad Samir]

On 22 July 2011 13:24, Christiaan Welvaart <cjw at daneel.dyndns.org> wrote:
> 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.

That policy has been implicitly in effect for a very long time, I
couldn't find a single gtk-doc pdf....

> Note however that HTML docs generated
> by doxygen can take a lot of space.
>

Yes; but that's a different issue, texlive* takes a lot of time to
install but builds pdf's fast; doxygen is vice versa, installs quickly
but takes a long time to build the docs sometimes...

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

You're talking about gnome-control-center? I thought autoreconf was
run by mistake, as the old comment said it must be run for patch19
which hasn't applied for some time.

But indeed, there should be a clear policy about that: either we
execute autoreconf/autotool.. etc for all packages (make
%configure2_5x run it or something), or we only run it when needed for
e.g. a patch or a package that has an old/new libtool than our
libtool....

-- 
Ahmad Samir