On Fri, 24 Aug 2018 23:06:46 +0300 Mart Raudsepp wrote: > USE=doc has a very overloaded meaning. > Meson doesn't ship pre-generated gtk-docs like autotools did, thus > developers writing GLib/GTK+ apps may want to keep them around, as > libraries move from autotools to meson. gtk-doc is integrated into > various IDEs and standalone devhelp viewer, giving a concrete case when > one might want to globally enable this (if using those IDEs until they > don't have online gtk-doc support that's still in the works, offline > developer docs, or matching system versions docs on purpose). > Per-package USE=doc is rather inconvenient to manage. > > Suggested description for global gtk-doc USE: > Build and install gtk-doc based developer documentation > > Longer version idea: > Build and install gtk-doc based developer documentation for dev- > util/devhelp, IDE and offline use > > > As the "Build" in the description suggests, this is only for when a > generation is needed. In practice this means that it shouldn't be used > for autotools based builds from tarballs, where the gtk-doc is already > shipped - for those you just want a dev-util/gtk-doc-am build dep, > which will make gtkdoc-rebase available that the standard gtk-doc > autotools rules call to make the pre-generated docs pretty much equal > to what you'd get from regenerating (mainly local offline links). In > those aforementioned autotools cases, it's often questionable to have a > USE flag (doc) at all for this when using proper tarballs. > > Most GNOME libraries have converted to using meson, thus building them > is necessary to keep local developer docs available and thus keep IDE > integration useful. Just always building gtk-doc would be distasteful > to some, hence this global USE flag proposal. There will be dozens of > consumers as I bump libraries for GNOME 3.26 and even more so 3.28 and > 3.30 soon enough afterwards. Some are already there (including some not > from GNOME), which currently use USE=doc for this. > Instead of supporting disted tarballs with meson, they plan to do > aforementioned online docs support for the API docs integrations, but > I haven't heard about any progress on that, plus offline use use case > will remain anyways.
Looks like we have a larger issue here. USE=doc covers all types of documentation outside of man, info pages and maybe some small text files. Such additional documentation often includes API reference manual and people may want to have it if they are using it during development or may want to disable it, but keep user-level documentation, because API docs often take quite some time to build. Such cases cover html docs, doxygen docs, gtk-doc and so on. So what about some new flag for API reference and other huge development documentation? E.g. USE="apidoc"? Best regards, Andrew Savchenko
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