25.11.2005, 0:58:28, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:

> On Fri, 25 Nov 2005 00:49:23 +0100 "Diego 'Flameeyes' Petteno"
> <flameeyes@gentoo.org> wrote:
> | Hi everybody, a little question that I'd like to be answered (so that
> | we can make it a sort of rule).
> | How should manpages that are generated be managed?
> |
> | The common sense and looking to other ebuilds would say to always
> | build man pages, but when it asks me to install something like
> | docbook-sgml-utils, I'm tempted not to do that ;)

> man pages can't be considered optional (despite what RMS says). They're
> not fancy extra HTML API documentation, they're core, so they don't get
> a USE flag.

> Of course, if FEATURES were in the USE expand list, you could use
> ! features_noman ? ( ) ...

That is all fine and dandy, but if you search bugzilla for USE=doc related
bugs, you might think twice before adding yet another inevitably broken thing
to portage. docbook-sgml-utils & co. is extremely fragile and buggy thing.

Actually, every automated text generation tool seems to be extremely fragile and buggy, see gtkdoc for instance, which also regularly breaks USE=doc.

About manpages, I agree that they are non-optional and should be provided all the time, which leads us straight to the solution : have the maintainer/ebuild writer generate once the manpages (they shouldn't depend on anything on the host machine, right ?) and provide them either directly in the portage tree, as many are under the 20K limit, or as a tarball in distfiles. If the developer hasn't docbok-sgml-utils and doesn't want to pollute his system with it, he could ask text-markup, for instance, to generate the manpages for him.

Of course, this doesn't solve the problem of manpages whose content is not the same everywhere (but are there some of these ? Or may be all of them are and I completely missed the point of this thread ?)

Regards,
Alexandre