Re: [PyX-devel] minor comments about 0.6.3 tarball, Debian package for PyX 0.6.3

[Andre W. <wo...@us...>]

Hi,

On 01.05.04, Faheem Mitha wrote:
> svn-buildpackage got upset becasuse the upstream tarball contains
> manual/manual.pdf, but this gets cleaned by `make clean' and gets built by
> make, so it looks like it should not be there in the upstream tarball. The
> same comments apply to faq/pyfaq.pdf.

I think there is difference between creating a source package (for
debian or similar) and our distribution of PyX. We include a
precompiled version of the manual and faq to make it easier for the
user to become familiar with PyX. You are right, you can create both
documents from the source, which is also included in the distribution.
But in order to build the pdf files you already have to setup your
environment properly (Python, TeX, etc.). However, when building a
source package for a distribution, those pdf files are not *source*
files and should not be part of a source package.

> I've considering removing these from the upstream tarball and rebuilding
> it, but I thought I would ask here first, since the tarball is supposed to
> correspond to pristine sources. Perhaps the *.pdf files were provided for
> people who don't want to build their own docs? It was not there in the
> 0.4.1 version in the official Debian package (I have not checked the
> others). It does make the tarball rather big.

Feel free do create the package the way it suits best to the policy of
the distribution. Nothing else matters as far as I am concerned.

> Also, there appears to be no way to generate examples/examples.pdf from
> source. Is that correct?

Yes. I consider example.pdf to be not at all usefull, once you can run
the examples yourself. We've build and included the pdf for promotion
only. I would suggest to take the source of the examples as parts of
the documentation without taking care of the examples.pdf. However we
may provide the build script in future as well (its available via CVS
already, of course) if there are strong demands for that ...

> Also, I ran into errors when trying to build manual.html. I'd appreciate
> assistance on this, though the error messages were not very useful, so I
> am not sure how much information I can provide.

You need to create a symbolic link of mkhowto from the python
documentation tools (Do not just copy the file, since it uses the
symlink to find further files it requires). In case this doesn't
already solve your problem, feel free to post a little more
information about your problem. But I'm not an expert in pythons
documentation tools ... I just worked it out how to get it running
myself (on fink, Jörg now uses it on debian as well). May be there
somebody on this list, who has a better knowlegde of pythons
documentation utils once we know a little more about your problem.


André

-- 
by  _ _      _    Dr. André Wobst
   / \ \    / )   wo...@us..., http://www.wobsta.de/
  / _ \ \/\/ /    PyX - High quality PostScript figures with Python & TeX
 (_/ \_)_/\_/           visit http://pyx.sourceforge.net/