Re: On accepting pre-generated doc from upstream

2013/6/7 Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer <perezmeyer@gmail.com>

Hi everyone. First of all, I'm cross-posting this between legal and devel
because I really don't know to which of them belongs (or maybe it does in
both).

The issue is this: Qt 5 has grown so large (850+MB unpacked in the single-
source tarball, will continue growing) that upstream also provides it as
submodules. 15 of them in 5.0.2.

Of course, in terms of maintainance, we have opted for the submodules choice.

Building the full doc could be done in two ways:

- Using the full source tarball. Saddly this means having to compile most of
it in order to get the tools for building the doc, or hacking far too much the
build system to do something else.

- Build each submodule's doc.

While the second option seems the clear winner, there is a gotcha: you need
packages 1 and 2 built and in the archive to build the documentation.
Including their documentation. Packages 3 to 15 should not present further
problems.

So this can be solved by packaging 1 and 2 without docs and pushing them to
the archive. Then, once 1 and 2 have been built on *every* arch, repackage 1
and 2 with the documentation and upload them.

This means that we need to bootstrap the packages. And we may need to do it
for every major release (5.1, 5.2,...), although it's not confirmed.

As a possible workaround, upstream has suggested to provide the documentation
already generated (could be for the submodules and/or the full doc, this has
not been discussed yet). My first reaction has been to think that this will
not be allowed in Debian, but giving it some more thought,:

- We do have the source code for generating it (preferred form of
modification).

- We can build it, but it requires lot of work... and avoid FTBFSs while
bootstrapping ;)

So, could we accept pre-generated documentation in this case?

For me , delivering the prebuilt doc is not an issue as long as we have the documentation source (latex to generate pdf for example).

We should avoid too much burden/tricks in package build for documentation if we can rely upon it while still being policy compliant (source given).

Though packager should at least build the doc himself, locally to be sure doc can indeed be generated.

Olivier

Kinds regards, and thanks in advance for your time, Lisandro.

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Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer
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http://perezmeyer.blogspot.com/

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