Re: Generated changes and patch systems

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org> writes:

> Here's how gtk-doc *used to* work:
>
> * gtk-doc parses source code and writes out skeletal tmpl/*.sgml
> * svn ci -m 'initial version of gtkdoc templates' tmpl
> * upstream doc author inserts content into tmpl/*.sgml
> * svn ci -m 'wrote some docs' tmpl
> * gtk-doc parses source code (to pick up any new functions) + tmpl/*.sgml,
>   and merges them
> * svn ci -m 'yay gtkdoc' tmpl
> * ...
>
> This is, as you've noticed, insane. Sane upstreams now write all the
> content for the documentation in /** */ comments in the source code, so
> the tmpl/*.sgml are purely generated and can safely be omitted from
> source-code control. (I have no opinion on whether your upstream is sane
> or not - please check.)
>
> However, the "no rule to make tmpl/*.sgml" issue still exists, as a
> relic of the old build process.

Thank you for the explanation!  This now makes much more sense.

Sounds to me like the first thing to try would be to just regenerate all
of the tmpl/*.sgml files via gtk-doc and delete them in the clean rule and
see if that works properly for this project.  That's what I'd do, at
least; that ensures a clean build without putting artifacts in the
*.diff.gz.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>