This is the mail archive of the cygwin-apps mailing list for the Cygwin project.


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]
Other format: [Raw text]

Re: texi2html coming back soon in tetex ?


--- Brian Dessent  wrote:


> Until about a month ago the Cygwin build process itself required
> texi2html, even though it was not available in any current package, and
> nobody objected.  People building Cygwin have long been told to use
> "make -k" so that doc building stuff doesn't cause the build to stop on
> missing tools.  For something that's tangential to the main
> functionality of a package, I'd say it's not entirely critical that
> every build tool be available in package form, especially if so noted in
> the readme.
> 
> Brian
> 

There may be precedent, but it doesn't sound like good policy for most
packages.  I note that building of Cygwin itself is sort of a singular point -
you can't use the normal tool chain - so it doesn't sound like a strong
precedent to me.

Comparison to Debian: when I download a Debian source package, apt-get can
automate the installation of the build-depends, and at the end of the build, I
should have the same exact binary package as is on the mirrors.  And in fact
Debian developers don't upload binary, they upload source.  Build daemons build
the binary semi-automatically.  If the package fails to build, it can't be
uploaded to a mirror.

Now admittedly, Cygwin is not Debian, and does not enforce Debian policies and
procedures.  Nevertheless, I think the best policy for my Cygwin packages is
that they build from source after installing all build-depends from Cygwin
setup.exe.  I think that is a reasonable and coherent policy, and intend to
follow it where at all possible.

I installed texi2html from Debian sarge into the Cygwin octave source tree, and
modified the build script to use it - seems to have worked, although there are
other problems to solve as well.  So it appears my policy is workable in this
case.

Thanks for your thoughtful comments.

JRP


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]