Re: xmldocs.make and friends

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

John Fleck wrote:

> Folks -
>
> During the run-up to GNOME 2.0, there was discussion of some sort of
> gnome-docs package that would include things like the xmldocs.make, the
> omf.make and whatever else we needed consistently deployed across
> packages.
>
> Jody made the argument (a smart one) that we would be bitten by the
> problem of having to maintain a bunch of separate copies (by my count at
> least 16 of 'em right now).
>
> Of course Jody was right, as Tommi's most recent addition to
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78484 shows.
>
> I'd like to restart the discussion about how to deal with this so that
> we can come up with an answer and take care of the problem in the GNOME
> 2.2 time frame. I don't have the auto* expertise to suggest the specific
> syntax needed in our build files. I can only assume the suggested fixed
> offered by James and Tommi on the bug report are correct. I do see more
> dragons ahead down the path we're on if we keep trying to fix this one
> xmldocs.make file at a time.
>  
The current practice of include'ing the desired rules seems sound, the 
problem to solve is to only have to maintain the file in a single 
location.  In the past, we have used a number of different methods for this.

For instance, with the dreaded "macros" directory, we used cvs includes, 
which has its own problems.  The main one was that of branching.  People 
would branch their module, and end up branching the macros directory as 
well.  This meant that they would effectively stop seeing updates to the 
macros, because the people maintaining the macros wouldn't merge changes 
to their branches.  So this solution would leave us with the same 
problems in some cases.  Just take a look at the "cvs status -v" output 
for some files in the macros directory to see how much of a problem this 
could be (about 200 branches so far ...).

The other way is to copy the files into the build tree as part of the 
autogen.sh process.  This would probably involve hackers needing to 
install a gnome-doc-tools package of some form, and having a script that 
would copy/symlink the files into the build tree, that could be called 
during autogen (I am guessing this is what Jody was suggesting).  This 
shouldn't suffer from any of the problems with the macros directory.

Btw, if you are wondering why I ran into the spaces/tabs problem in 
sgmldocs.make and xmldocs.make, it is probably because I was using 
automake-1.6.  It handles the include statement in Makefile.am's 
differently from 1.4 -- it actually performs the inclusion itself, 
rather than letting make handle it.  This may be useful to you, as it 
meanas you can use automake syntax in included makefile fragments (which 
could help simplify the rules).

James.

--
Email: james daa com au              | Linux.conf.au   http://linux.conf.au/
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/ | Jan 22-25   Perth, Western Australia.