Re: Making autogsdoc a separate package

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Tuesday, July 22, 2003, at 02:34 PM, Helge Hess wrote:

> Adam Fedor wrote:
> > Nicola Pero wrote:
> > > I'd like to propose to make autogsdoc a separate package from
> > > gnustep-base.
>
> Excellent idea, IMHO! Only pros:
> - code size of gstep-base is reduced

Net code size increased (as Adam pointed out ... more to maintain).

> - more easy to use as a separate tool with lF&Cocoa

I don't think this would be the case ... for  usability with lF and 
Cocoa
you would need someone to support it for those systems, and would
need to build and install the additions library from gstep-base.
No reason why that should be simpler as a separate package
as far as I can see.

> - independend versioning

Am not sure what you mean by this or why it should be considered
a good thing.

> > > It has nothing to do with gnustep-base actually, as it's a completely
> > > independent documentation tool.
>
> Yes, it would be very nice to have autodoc separate for use with 
> libFoundation and Cocoa.
>
> > Yes, but it's hard enough to get people to write/read the 
> > documentation as it is. Requiring a separate package would make it 
> > harder (plus I'd have to maintain a separate package as well 
> > (relases,etc)).
>
> Well, an end-user certainly doesn't generate the documentation himself 
> (at least he shouldn't be required to do so). Also documentation 
> itself should be a separate package, IMHO (eg I almost never install 
> documentation packages, but rather prefer to look at web docs).

The purpose of autogsdoc is for the developer (not the end user, but 
someone
who fixes bugs in and contributes to the the GNUstep codebase) to be 
able to
generate and view new documentation as s/he makes changes to the source,
so that the barrier to having corrected/up-to-date documentation is 
minimised.

Making them download a separate package is putting a barrier back up.

If it's useful for other purposes, that's a bonus.