Re: Tarball generation using outdated tools (gnome-doc-utils, autotools)

[Jan de Groot <jan jgc homeip net>]

On Thu, 2007-02-15 at 11:04 +0000, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> hi Jan;
> 
> On Thu, 2007-02-15 at 11:44 +0100, Jan de Groot wrote:
> 
> > I think we should pay attention to this issue for the final release
> > tarballs, as that is what people running gnome from source will use when
> > GNOME 2.18 becomes final. Many people don't like the fact that GNOME is
> > 50-100 tarballs with many dependencies to get it complete, but when we
> > have several important packages (gnome-applets, gucharmap,
> > gnome-terminal, gnome-power-manager, file-roller, gnome-utils, totem)
> > that don't compile out of the box, these people will certainly have
> > something to rant about (and to make things worse: ./autogen.sh is not
> > included in tarballs, it's only in SVN (totem and epiphany are an
> > exception here)).
> 
> I usually smoketest every gnome-utils tarball on my edgy box, to see if
> it passes make distcheck outside the jhbuild jail where I distcheck from
> SVN.  if there are any issues, please open a bug with the autotools
> versions you are using, so that I don't loose track of this.
> 
> ciao,
>  Emmanuele.

Ubuntu Edgy ships with gnome-doc-utils 0.8, which is incompatible with
the 0.9.1 I have on my system (yes, still need to update to 0.9.2). As
gnome-doc-utils 0.9.2 is the one that is shipped in the GNOME 2.17.91
desktop release, the tarball for packages inside this release should be
generated with that.
All gnome-doc-utils build problems can be solved by regenerating the
gnome-doc-utils.make file that comes with the tarball release. I don't
know if the tarball is compatible with older gnome-doc-utils though, but
as 0.9x. is more strict than 0.8.x, I doubt it would give problems with
that.

For the autotools version: at this moment I've only found file-roller
and control-center to be affected, the other packages don't include
static files when building with --disable-static. A bug for file-roller
is still open, the bug for control-center has been closed as NOTGNOME,
as it's not a problem with the GNOME source, but with the generated
tarball when generated by a buggy version of autoconf/make.