Re: Use of maintainer mode in GNOME modules

[Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org>]

2011/9/12 Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>:
> On Fri, 2011-09-09 at 13:09 +0100, Javier Jardón wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> As you can read in the Ryan blog post [1], the use of the
>> AM_MAINTAINER_MODE macro is only correct when used in this way:
>>
>> AM_MAINTAINER_MODE([enable])
>>
>> As ryan said in the blog post, fredp made a report page for packages
>> using AM_MAINTAINER_MODE.
>>
>> green  -> no “AM_MAINTAINER_MODE” at all (good)
>> yellow -> “AM_MAINTAINER_MODE([enable])”  (fine)
>> orange -> means that your package is currently broken and needs to be fixed.
>>
>> So if Its not already fixed in your module, we are going to proced to
>> fix all the GNOME modules that appear
>> in "orange" and convert it to "yellow", ie
>>
>> AM_MAINTAINER_MODE -> AM_MAINTAINER_MODE([enable])
>>
>> Thanks for you collaboration.
>>
>> [1] http://blogs.gnome.org/desrt/2011/09/08/am_maintainer_mode-is-not-cool/
>> [2] http://people.gnome.org/~fpeters/reports/maintainer-mode.html
>
> We don't really want this change in the gtkmm (and friends) modules.
> Chaning AM_MAINTAINER_MODE to AM_MAINTAINER_MODE([enable]) will change
> the default behaviour in tarball builds.
>
> We currently ship generated C++ files and HTML documentation files in
> our tarballs. Distro packagers generally don't want to regenerate those
> files because a) It's unnecessary and b) It requires extra build tools.

Hi guys,
   After reading the blog post and this thread yesterday I did not think
much of it... but can we clarify this point ?

If I have AM_MAINTAINER_MODE([enable]) then what happens by
default ?
   a.) docs and user manual are not included in the tarball ?
   b.) docs are built and distributed in the tarball but typing 'make'
causes them to be rebuilt ?

Actually I accepted a patch to "modernize" Glade's configure script (which
adds the '([enable])' bit to AM_MAINTAINER_MODE) and it's possible that
I have just not noticed the pain which I've caused anyone downloading
our tarballs
(since I obviously happen to always have all the tools I need to build GNOME
from git).

We've always been very clear about this, to build from a git checkout
you need "a whole lot of gnome stuff", but when you build from the tarball
you really only need a basic gnu toolchain and the GTK+ development files
and dependencies.

If users are forced to have unnecessary tools on their system to download
and test Glade tarballs, this is definitely a problem for us and we will
probably be inclined to revert to just AM_MAINTAINER_MODE.

But, perhaps this is just a misunderstanding, does this change really
push complications onto the innocent downloaders of our tarballs ?

Best regards,
         -Tristan

>
> We don't want distro packagers to regenerate the files because there is
> a risk that the output will not be the same if they have slightly
> different versions of the dependencies, including newer versions. It can
> even risk breaking ABI. Distro packagers don't want that either.
>
> If, for some reason, distro packagers do want to turn this off, they
> already can with the configure option.
>
> So, for *mm modules, it doesn't seem to be a change that would actually
> help anybody in the real world, though it risks causing real problems.
>
>
> Theoretically we might not be doing things in the right way, but then it
> would be up to someone to fix things properly instead of just breaking
> our modules.
>
>
> We have seen you make this change at least once without asking the
> maintainer:
> http://git.gnome.org/browse/gdlmm/commit/?id=3272c0aa3008654e54b6fd68af8c324db3ee72f8
> even though this has not apparently been approved yet as a gnome-wide
> goal.
>
> --
> murrayc murrayc com
> www.murrayc.com
> www.openismus.com
>
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