> thank you for packaging GNU APL for Debian, and for the well-organised
> patch series.
I try...
> Regarding your note about leaving autotools-derived files out of the
> repository: we intentionally ship configure and Makefile.in in the
> release tarballs so that users can build GNU APL without having Autotools
> installed. The SVN repository does contain the generated files, which I
> agree is slightly unusual, but for our purposes it works well and it means
> that "svn export + ./configure + make" works out of the box.
Just a suggestion.
Debian (another I think other distributions) have a policy of trying
to rebuild *everything* that can be rebuilt. Keeping derived files out
of the VCS serves the same purpose: it forces rebuilding them during
development. Failure to enforce this can lead to missing sources, like
those .texi files that weren't in the VCS, being missed because the
build system is set up to use prebuilt files.
Having those files in the "upstream" sources is no problem for me. The
ones actually generated by autotools are automatically regenerated. I
just have to be sure others are regenerated.
> The doc/DALY/Makefile.am rewrite and the info-in-builddir configure.ac
> change were not applied for now, as I would like to understand the full
> impact on non-Debian builds before committing to that approach. If you
> see a concrete problem with the current doc/ build I am happy to revisit.
Well, one problem is they did not rebuild the .info / .html files
despite some of the source files having changed (missing @includes,
missing .texi files) in ways that made them impossible to rebuild.
They're also kind of complex; the complexity was to compensate for
missing functionality in old versions of automake. I *think* my
replacements are the "modern" way to do it.
The rewrite is missing logic to yank in prebuilt .info / .html files
if the build fails. That could be done easily by putting those in a
prebuild/ directory, and doing
foo.info: foo.texi
(TEXINFO) .... || ( $(ENABLE_PREBUILT) && cp prebuilt/$@ ./ )
with ENABLE_PREBUILT=true by default, set in configure.ac.
But maintaining Debian-only patches is no problem for me. It's really
no big deal, I'm just explaining my motivation for the rewrite of
doc/Makefile.am
> Please do not hesitate to report further packaging issues.
Will do!
Cheers,
--Barak.
