[Doxygen-develop] release tarballs

[Helmut G. <he...@su...>]

Dear Doxygen developers,

I am writing to you on behalf of the Debian project. There are a few
issues with the doxygen package as shipped by Debian that are imho best
addressed upstream. Please have a look at whether this is reasonable.

In http://bugs.debian.org/569504 Jonathan Nieder asked to include
upstream changelogs and notes that these are only available from the
website. Would it be possible to include changelogs in future release
tarballs?

The current way of shipping jquery in Doxygen poses a set of problems
(mainly http://bugs.debian.org/625956) to Debian. In order to ship a
package in the Debian main distribution the source code must be
available in preferred form for modification. This is not the case with
the version of jquery embedded in Doxygen tarballs, because they are
minified. Would it be possible to additionally ship the original
uncompressed javascript components in future release tarballs even if
they are not used for building Doxygen?

(Moving to wishlist stuff.)

In addition it would be great to be able to use the system version
jquery instead of Doxygen's copy. It is not clear how to achieve this in
a way, that does not pose unreasonable burden on either upstream or the
Debian packaging. Discussion on this issue has started on
http://bugs.debian.org/630982 but has not come to a final conclusion.
The question relevant here appears to be whether Doxygen upstream could
document which versions of jquery (+ components) it needs to work
properly.

It would be interesting to know whether the javascript components, style
sheets and icons shipped with one version of Doxygen could be used with
an older version of Doxygen (possibly broken with major releases). That
would allow us to move them to a package shared among documentation
packages instead of having about 100 packages contain these copies. To
get a rough idea on how many copies we currently ship, have a look at
just the copies of the latest (packaged) version of doxygen.css:
http://dedup.debian.net/hash/sha512/d43d1384010e768003ad5784c9a6af464046871f194dd069b7276aa06c9d96f5dbb9d6bc1faabe836c7713de9db31c54332803986d018f84c0856b410c597f74

Thanks for considering

Helmut