Re: doc compilations: build-time or pre-built?

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

marciotex@gmail.com wrote:

> tony mancill <tmancill@debian.org> writes:
>
>> Steinar H. Gunderson wrote:
>>> On Tue, Jul 04, 2006 at 07:25:16PM -0300, marciotex@gmail.com wrote:
>>>> 1) compile docs pre-build-time; or
>>>> 2)  compile docs in build-time
>>> 
>>> Definitely the latter. We build stuff at build time for a reason,
>>> architecture-specific or -independent alike.
>>
>> Is this the consensus/best-practice on this question?
>>
>> It seems like it would be quite taxing on the autobuilders to have to pull
>> something like docbook (and its chain of dependencies) into a pbuilder just
>> to recompile a manpage that doesn't change between architectures.
>>
>> I'm interested in this because I've typically done (2), but have recently
>> started to think that (1) is more appropriate, particularly for packages
>> where the documentation is a simple manpage.
>
> And It's exactly this the case in question, for me.

I think that if upstream ships pre-built docs, then it is not necessary
to rebuild them (but you should verify that it's possible...).  In all
other cases, I would argue for generating the docs at build-time.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)