Re: Making autogsdoc a separate package

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Tuesday, July 22, 2003, at 11:24 AM, Nicola Pero wrote:

> > > We still haven't agreed on whether to build the Documentation in the
> > > libraries by default either.
> >
> > The only argument I'm aware of for not building/installing the
> > documentation by default (other
> > than the argument from personal taste of course) is that it'
> > error-prone and looks bad if it
> > goes wrong.
>
> Building documentation simply doesn't work on my system.

How about some bug reports to indicate exactly what is going wrong?
Normally you are very good about bug reports and fixes.

> When I type 'make', then 'make install', autogsdoc is run during 'make
> install'.  This is plainly wrong, and causes 'make install' to be
> unreasonably slow and often/consistently fail on my systems.  Which is 
> why
> I always turn off generating documentation.

1. I don't know why it should fail ... but again that's a reason for as 
bug
report and a fix.
2. If it's run unnecessarily (and I think it probably is), that's a bug 
in the
makefiles package, and again we should fix it.  Probably just a case of
having make check all the source/headers against a timestamp of the
last run of document generation.

> And I think this should be the default for newbies - they have enough
> problems already installing gnustep.  Give them easy/quick compilation 
> and
> installation of libraries, and pregenerated documentation.

Yes ... isn't that what we are aiming to do?   I thought that the 
distributions
now contained pre-built documentation (not an issue that I'm familiar 
with
as I use CVS of course).   If that's not the case, we probably need 
makefile
support for doing it ...
When we discuss building documentation by default, I assume that's for
developers ... if you aren't a developer, you don't change the source 
code,
and documentation should therefore not be regenerated (unless the make
code is a bit broken as suggested above).

> Documentation does not need to be compiled specifically for the target
> machine - you can compile it once and distribute it in html for 
> everyone
> else.  Why making life more difficult for new people.  The difficulty 
> of
> installing gnustep scares off many people.  Let's try to keep that to a
> minimum.

I don't *think* that's the issue ... on the basis of this email, it 
sounds like
I agree with you entirely on this ... and I'm not sure that *anyone* 
disagrees.