Re: [Plplot-devel] api.xml patch + DocBook building rant

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

On Sat, 8 Mar 2003, Rafael Laboissiere wrote:

> Could one of you make me a favor and apply the patch below to api.xml?

Done.  It solves the problem, but also highlights some dependency issues
that need to be fixed, see below.

>
> I am just realizing that when Octave bindings building is enable, we must
> check in configure.ac for the presence of some of the Perl modules.  This is
> done currently only for the DocBook documentation.

I agree, but keep the list of modules to the absolute minimum required.  At
the moment, there is no problem with generating the octave documentation on
RedHat with their standard perl modules, but if you ask for anything more
that is not needed to generate the octave documentation, you probably won't
be able to build octave on RH since their perl module support is so minimal.

Now to the dependency issue.  I applied the patch and re-ran make, but the
perl script in question was not executed again unless I ran make clean first.
Here is the bad stanza from Makefile.am:

plplot_octave_txt/plplot.doc: etc/plplot.doc
	mkdir -p plplot_octave_txt
	cp etc/plplot.doc plplot_octave_txt/plplot.doc
	cd plplot_octave_txt; \
	../../../doc/docbook/bin/api2text.pl \
	../../../doc/docbook/src/plplotdoc.xml.in \
	../../../doc/docbook/src/api.xml


There are substantial dependency problems with this stanza.  First, the
prerequisite list should include ../../../doc/docbook/bin/api2text.pl \
../../../doc/docbook/src/plplotdoc.xml.in \
../../../doc/docbook/src/api.xml. That is easy enough to put in and solves
the current dependency issue.  However, I also notice the target list needs
an additional entry since api2text.pl generates a very large number of *.txt
files.  I don't think we want to put those in the target list since it would
be a maintenance headache.  However, could you make some sort of timestamp
file to be put in the target list that was updated *only if* api2text.pl was
a success?  Without this time stamp, if you simply rerun make after a syntax
problem in api.xml, the make would go through without any apparent problems.
The only symptom would be the plplot_octave_txt/*.txt files were not there
or incomplete.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin
email: ir...@be...
phone: 250-727-2902

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and
Analysis (www.cccma.bc.ec.gc.ca) and the PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org).

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