Re: Tarball generation using outdated tools (gnome-doc-utils, autotools)

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2007-02-15 at 13:13 +0100, Jan de Groot wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-02-15 at 13:07 +0100, Jan de Groot wrote:
> > 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.
> > 
> 
> OK, I was too quick with this one:
> 
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=402159
> 
> This has been fixed in 0.9.2, category checks are skipped when an old
> gnome-doc-utils.make is included in the tarball.
> 
> Packages should build fine with the latest gnome-doc-utils, even when
> the tarball is generated using some outdated gnome-doc-utils package.

Just to clarify for everybody:  In the 0.9 series, I added some
code to check the ScrollKeeper category codes in the OMF files.
The category codes are checked against those in the system file
scrollkeeper_cl.xml, which we find like so:

  `scrollkeeper-config --pkgdatadir`/Templates/C/scrollkeeper_cl.xml

This change happened in two places.  First, gnome-doc-utils.make
finds the file and passes its location as a parameter to db2omf.xsl.
Then db2omf.xsl checks the category codes in your OMF file against
those found in that file.

All well and good, except that gnome-doc-utils.make is shipped
inside the tarball, whereas db2omf.xsl is not.  So if you and
your user don't have the same version of gnome-doc-utils, there
will be a version mismatch.

Now, if you built your tarball with an 0.9 release, there should
be no problems.  It will pass the extra parameter to db2omf.xsl.
Older versions of db2omf.xsl will safely ignore the parameter,
and the worst thing that happens is that category codes don't
get checked when the user builds.

But if you build your tarball with an 0.8 release, the parameter
will not be passed.  If your user has 0.9.1 installed, it will
blindly attempt to check category codes, even though it doesn't
have a scrollkeeper_cl.xml file to look at.  This was fixed in
0.9.2 by making db2omf.xsl skip the checks if the parameter was
not passed.

In summary:
  YOU    USER
  0.8.x  0.8.x  OK
  0.8.x  0.9.1  BAD
  0.8.x  0.9.2  OK
  0.9.x  0.8.x  OK
  0.9.x  0.9.x  OK

There should never be a problem if tarballs are built using
any 0.9 release.  So maintainers should try to do that going
forward.

--
Shaun