Re: Policy ready to be edited
On Sun, Oct 19, 2003 at 11:05:27PM +0200, Sylvain LE GALL wrote:
> Hello,
>
> On Sun, Oct 19, 2003 at 04:46:37PM +0200, Jérôme Marant wrote:
> > Quoting Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@debian.org>:
> >
> > > I haven't had a look at the policy document committed by Sylvain, but
> > > mainly the idea should be _not_ to mandate where to install META files.
> > > This remark is just because a few time ago we wondered about decide a
> > > common location to place META files. IMO the only requirement we should
> > > have is this META files are installed in a place which permits to
> > > findlib to find the packages. stdlib/libdir/META is ok, stdlib/META.pkg
> > > is ok, stdlib/libdir/META.pkg is not ok.
> >
> > OK.
> >
> > ...
> >
> > > It depends on your idea of "problem". If problem is just "something not
> > > working" we have no problem, if problem is "something that can be
> > > improbed", the problem is that we have no documentation of the API
> > > installed by the various library and we can easily automatically
> > > generate them where they aren't available.
> > > The idea here is to have a debhelper or something similar which can be
> > > invoked in debian/rules and automatically generate documentation for the
> > > .mli files he found, register the result with doc-base and so on.
> >
> > It think that this is an upstream problem. If mli files lack
> > ocamldoc documentation, they may be written and sent upstream
> > along with the makefile improvement for documentation generation.
> > (I've already asked you about this in ocaml camp private mail
> > with no reply).
>
> I remember to have replied... But i could be in error.
>
> I agree that upstream should comment the mli in order to have enough
> info... But generating the doc corresponding to it, really should be a
> packager responsability. If we can provide only one .odoc to generate
> all the documentation, it is far more better than generating HTML,
> man... documentation : it saves space in .deb and times on compile time.
>
> To my mind it will made user really more comfortable to have a HTML page
> with all the exported function of a library ( even if there is no other
> comment ). For example, i still need to generate lablgtk ocamldoc
> documentation from mli... If something could do it automatically it
> would save me a lot of time...
We could also ship the .mli in the package, and generate all the doc at
install time.
But then, it all depends on how time consuming the generation process is
compared to the size of the files.
The documentation could also be moved in a separate -doc package if
needed, with a template debian/rules patch for them.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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