Re: [bug #41125] -make documentation is un-installable

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 7 Jan 2014, at 21:31, Markus Hitter <address@hidden> wrote:

>  This prerequisite you talk about is a
> showstopper in some environments and does not solve the problem. If
> having showstoppers is the intention, I feel sorry for GNUstep.

Please, please, calm down and try to help me here;

I'm asking for information about what the problem.  Saying it's 'a showstopper' 
means something to you, but it doesn't tell anyone else anything.  We need to 
have it explained to us in what way it's an issue for you.
It does not seem reasonable for it to be a showstopper for anything (lots of 
packages have dependencies, so there's no obvious reason why this should be 
special), especially given the flexibility of location/configuratrion available 
with the environment variables and config file... so you really need to explain 
in some detail.

>> It can't install the documentation because, at this
>> point you haven't configured/installed gnustep-make, so the eventual
>> installation location is unknown.
> 
> It could, because at this point -make is actually configured, so the
> installation location and layout is defined. But it ignores each of
> --prefix, --with-layout and DESTDIR. That's what I'm talking about and
> that's what the shell snippets demonstrate.

I see your point ...  you have run the configure script on gnustep-make, and 
you expect the documentation package to use the configuration settings you 
specified then.

But the documentation package is consistent with all other packages (so the 
concept is simple ... you install gnustep-make and then everything else in 
gnustep is built/installed using that) ... it uses your currently selected 
gnustep-make installation to determine where to install things.

When you don't have a gnustep-make installation selected, it could guess that 
it should build/install one based on the current config in the enclosing 
directory,
but it hasn't been told to do that and could well be doing the wrong thing if 
it did ... given that you haven't installed gnustep-make it's a fair assumption 
that you have not yet configured it as you want it.  You could add support for 
some variation of this behavior, document it clearly (since it's not the 
nmormal behavior), and perhaps make the build/install process prompt the user 
to confirm that they really want to do it.

> 
>>> I have another ~15 bugs similar to this one stacked.
>> 
>> Well, [...]
> 
> Please scratch that. Very apparently it's much easier to fix the bug
> than to explain somebody with commit privileges that the bug is actually
> a bug, so I'll do this next time (and keep the patch in the packaging
> patch stack).

Perhaps if you supplied patches it would be clearer what you are trying to 
achieve (often the code clarifies the explanation as well as an explanation 
clarifying code).
It's a shame you don't feel willing/able to take time to explain the problems; 
I feel sure that if you did so you would find that many have simple solutions, 
or could at least come up with solutions consistent with behavior elsewhere.  
We do need to be able to understand more about what you need to do in order to 
suggest ways that you can do it.