pyx-devel

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

[Faheem M. <fa...@em...>]

Dear PyX Developers,

I recently discovered PyX. I had recently started using Python, and read
an article on PyX in lwn.net (April 15th edition).
http://lwn.net/Articles/79562/ is the url.

This looks like a very interesting project.

Since the official Debian package is hopelessly out of date, I spent a bit
of time rolling my own. This was relatively easy since I was able to build
on the work of the official Debian package.

I use the version control system, subversion, so I tried using the Debian
helper scripts svn-buildpackage
(http://packages.debian.org/testing/devel/svn-buildpackage).

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'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.

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

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.

                                                              Faheem.

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/

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

[Faheem M. <fa...@em...>]

On Mon, 3 May 2004, Andre Wobst wrote:

> 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.

Yes, I see. It would optimal if you could ship a separate source-only
tar.gz not containing any pdfs. This would save on space on mirrors
and could be used by people who only want the source. Currently around
half the source by size consists of the pdfs.

> > I've considering removing these from the upstream tarball and rebuildin=
g
> > 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 f=
or
> > 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.

Debian's policy is to ship a copy of the pristine upstream sources (as
*.orig.tar.gz) along with a diff. Pristine in the sense that the
md5sums of the source shipped should match that of the source from
upstream. So the above is not an option.

> > 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 ...

I think it would be useful to make it possible to build it. For
example, the pdf could be built with different options...

> > Also, I ran into errors when trying to build manual.html. I'd appreciat=
e
> > 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, J=F6rg 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.

I put the PyX packages I produced online. They are the latest version:
0.6.3. Add the following to your sources.list, and you can get them.
 You can also get the sources by using deb-src.

deb http://www.stat.unc.edu/students/faheem/debian/ ./
deb-src http://www.stat.unc.edu/students/faheem/debian/ ./

If you download the sources and rename debian/rules.broken to
debian/rules, and then try to rebuild the debs on a Debian
testing/unstable machine, you should be able to reproduce the problem I
was seeing.

I can send you the error log, but it is not very informative.

1) as root do

apt-get build-dep python2.3-pyx
apt-get install devscripts latex2html

2) Do

apt-get source python2.3-pyx

as user in some scratch directory

3) Type

debuild binary

in the subdirectory pyx-0.6.3 produced.

The official Debian maintainer of PyX just uploaded packages, but he
doesn't build html files either.

Please CC me. I'm not subscribed. Thanks.
                                                          Faheem.

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

[Graham W. <bo...@de...>]

On Sat, May 08, 2004 at 10:51:43PM -0400, Faheem Mitha wrote:
> I think it would be useful to make it possible to build it. For
> example, the pdf could be built with different options...

Yes, I agree that this is good idea, especially if a source-only tarball
were to be created.

> The official Debian maintainer of PyX just uploaded packages, but he
> doesn't build html files either.

This is because latex2html is non-free, which means I would have to put
the PyX documentation package in non-free.

--=20
gram

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

[Faheem M. <fa...@em...>]

On Sat, 8 May 2004, Graham Wilson wrote:

> > The official Debian maintainer of PyX just uploaded packages, but he
> > doesn't build html files either.
>
> This is because latex2html is non-free, which means I would have to put
> the PyX documentation package in non-free.

I see. I was misled by the fact that latex2html was in main in woody. I
see that latex2html was moved into non-free relatively recently.

One possibility is that you could separate the doc package into
python-pyx-html-doc and python-pyx-pdf-doc, and then put
python-pyx-html-doc in contrib. I don't think you would need to put it in
non-free since it seems to me to satisfy the requirements of
http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#s-contrib.

I wonder how the main python html docs are done. They seem to be in main.
It looks like it is generated using latex2html.

Have you been able to build the html manual? I have tried and failed.

                                                               Faheem.

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

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

Hi,

On 08.05.04, Faheem Mitha wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Yes, I see. It would optimal if you could ship a separate source-only
> tar.gz not containing any pdfs. This would save on space on mirrors
> and could be used by people who only want the source. Currently around
> half the source by size consists of the pdfs.

I'm not aware of a support to build different kind of source packages
within Pythons distutils.

> Debian's policy is to ship a copy of the pristine upstream sources (as
> *.orig.tar.gz) along with a diff. Pristine in the sense that the
> md5sums of the source shipped should match that of the source from
> upstream. So the above is not an option.

I suggest to skip the pdfs in the source distribution. This seems to
be the only meaningful solution. We should prepare and distribute a
separate documentation file containing *only* the precompiled pdf
files.

> > > Also, there appears to be no way to generate examples/examples.pdf from
> > > source. Is that correct?
> 
> I think it would be useful to make it possible to build it. For
> example, the pdf could be built with different options...

Ok, I've modified MANIFEST.in accordingly.

> I put the PyX packages I produced online. They are the latest version:
> 0.6.3. Add the following to your sources.list, and you can get them.
>  You can also get the sources by using deb-src.
> 
> deb http://www.stat.unc.edu/students/faheem/debian/ ./
> deb-src http://www.stat.unc.edu/students/faheem/debian/ ./
> 
> If you download the sources and rename debian/rules.broken to
> debian/rules, and then try to rebuild the debs on a Debian
> testing/unstable machine, you should be able to reproduce the problem I
> was seeing.

I'll try this out tonight (I don't have my debian unstable box here)
and see, whether I'm able to reproduce/solve/whatever the problem.

BTW the whole discussion about latex2html is certainly interesting. On
the other hand we're not forcing latex2html ourselfs. Its just the way
the python documentation utilities currently work. It allows us to put
a html-version of the documentation online -- which is nice. For local
usage the pdf documents might be ok skipping the issue of latex2html
completely. As far as I am concerned its a minor point whether you are
able to provide a python-pyx-doc-html or not.


André

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

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

[Faheem M. <fa...@em...>]

On Mon, 10 May 2004, Andre Wobst wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On 08.05.04, Faheem Mitha wrote:
> > > 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.
> >
> > Yes, I see. It would optimal if you could ship a separate source-only
> > tar.gz not containing any pdfs. This would save on space on mirrors
> > and could be used by people who only want the source. Currently around
> > half the source by size consists of the pdfs.
>
> I'm not aware of a support to build different kind of source packages
> within Pythons distutils.
>
> > Debian's policy is to ship a copy of the pristine upstream sources (as
> > *.orig.tar.gz) along with a diff. Pristine in the sense that the
> > md5sums of the source shipped should match that of the source from
> > upstream. So the above is not an option.
>
> I suggest to skip the pdfs in the source distribution. This seems to
> be the only meaningful solution. We should prepare and distribute a
> separate documentation file containing *only* the precompiled pdf
> files.

Yes, I think this would be a good solution.

> > > > Also, there appears to be no way to generate examples/examples.pdf from
> > > > source. Is that correct?
> >
> > I think it would be useful to make it possible to build it. For
> > example, the pdf could be built with different options...
>
> Ok, I've modified MANIFEST.in accordingly.

Sorry, I'm not clear what you have changed.

> > I put the PyX packages I produced online. They are the latest version:
> > 0.6.3. Add the following to your sources.list, and you can get them.
> >  You can also get the sources by using deb-src.
> >
> > deb http://www.stat.unc.edu/students/faheem/debian/ ./
> > deb-src http://www.stat.unc.edu/students/faheem/debian/ ./
> >
> > If you download the sources and rename debian/rules.broken to
> > debian/rules, and then try to rebuild the debs on a Debian
> > testing/unstable machine, you should be able to reproduce the problem I
> > was seeing.
>
> I'll try this out tonight (I don't have my debian unstable box here)
> and see, whether I'm able to reproduce/solve/whatever the problem.

Ok. Thanks.

> BTW the whole discussion about latex2html is certainly interesting. On
> the other hand we're not forcing latex2html ourselfs. Its just the way
> the python documentation utilities currently work. It allows us to put
> a html-version of the documentation online -- which is nice. For local
> usage the pdf documents might be ok skipping the issue of latex2html
> completely. As far as I am concerned its a minor point whether you are
> able to provide a python-pyx-doc-html or not.

Debian's preferred form of documention is html. So I think this is at
least of some interest wrt the Debian package. I certainly don't think
this is something the PyX project should be concerned about, but any
assistance is appreciated.

Thanks for the reply.
                                                           Faheem.

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

[Graham W. <bo...@de...>]

On Mon, May 10, 2004 at 12:59:56PM -0400, Faheem Mitha wrote:
> On Mon, 10 May 2004, Andre Wobst wrote:
> > I suggest to skip the pdfs in the source distribution. This seems to
> > be the only meaningful solution. We should prepare and distribute a
> > separate documentation file containing *only* the precompiled pdf
> > files.
> 
> Yes, I think this would be a good solution.

Another idea would be to just distribute the PDF files on the web, and
users can get them from there, or compile them from source using the
tarball. Your call, Andre.

> > Ok, I've modified MANIFEST.in accordingly.
> 
> Sorry, I'm not clear what you have changed.

The MANIFEST.in file is what setup.py uses to determine which files
should be in the source tarball.

> Debian's preferred form of documention is html. So I think this is at
> least of some interest wrt the Debian package. I certainly don't think
> this is something the PyX project should be concerned about, but any
> assistance is appreciated.

Agreed.

-- 
gram

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

[Joerg L. <jo...@us...>]

On 10.05.04, Graham Wilson wrote:
> Another idea would be to just distribute the PDF files on the web, and
> users can get them from there, or compile them from source using the
> tarball. Your call, Andre.

+1

        Joerg

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

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

On 11.05.04, Joerg Lehmann wrote:
> On 10.05.04, Graham Wilson wrote:
> > Another idea would be to just distribute the PDF files on the web, and
> > users can get them from there, or compile them from source using the
> > tarball. Your call, Andre.
> 
> +1

It would be ok for me, but we should keep in mind, that we can't
download a pdf-manual for an outdated version anymore. On the other
hand, somebody who sticks to an old version for some reason will have
the possibility to build the old version of the manual etc. himself.
(I'm using outdated version quite often myself since I don't port all
my stuff to all new versions -- it would just be a waste of time.)

To summarize this discussion: For future releases we distribute only
the sources (including the ability to build all documentation) and
place the current compiled documentation (pdf and html) on the web.
Please complain now when you would like to see something else to
happen.


André

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

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

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

Hi,

On 08.05.04, Faheem Mitha wrote:
> apt-get build-dep python2.3-pyx
> apt-get install devscripts latex2html
> apt-get source python2.3-pyx
> debuild binary

I've tried that and it doesn't work for me either. I've used the
package from Debian unstable, since its available now.

Faheem, could you try whether you step into the same problem. I've
patched latex2html in order to get it working. Just make a local copy
of the perl script latex2html and apply the following patch:

--- /usr/bin/latex2html	2004-04-23 14:57:26.000000000 +0200
+++ latex2html	2004-05-11 14:27:14.000000000 +0200
@@ -4811,7 +4811,10 @@
 		if ($cmd =~ /$sizechange_rx/o) {
 		    $pc_after = &$cmd_sub($pc_after, $open_tags_R);
 		} else {
-		    $pc_after = &$cmd_sub($pc_after, $open_tags_R);
+		    if ("$cmd_sub" ne "do_cmd_textohtmlinfopage")
+		    {
+		      $pc_after = &$cmd_sub($pc_after, $open_tags_R);
+		    }
 		};
 	    } elsif ((defined &$cmd_msub)&&!$NO_SIMPLE_MATH) {
 #print "\nMCMD:$cmd_msub :  ";

You can than run the creation of the html pages by
PATH=.:$PATH make html
in the manual subdirectory (put the patched latex2html into that
directory).

In case this helps for you as well, you may understand better whats
going wrong here. I just don't understand it (my perl knowledge is
quite limited). I would expect that the subroutine
do_cmd_textohtmlinfopage is callable (at least its defined), but this
seems to fail.

I should note that there seems to be at least two additional problems.
First mkhowto fails due to a missing
/usr/lib/python2.3/doc/html/style.css later on. I havn't yet
investigated it further -- it might be an error in the python package,
but I'm not sure at all. And finally the png creation seems to be
disabled somehow (note that the png we're creating in the Makefile are
for usage in pdf only). I didn't look into that issue either.


André

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

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

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

Hi,

On 11.05.04, Andre Wobst wrote:
> On 08.05.04, Faheem Mitha wrote:
> > apt-get build-dep python2.3-pyx
> > apt-get install devscripts latex2html
> > apt-get source python2.3-pyx
> > debuild binary
> 
> I've tried that and it doesn't work for me either. I've used the
> package from Debian unstable, since its available now.

I'm sorry, I should be more precise here: while the creation of the
debian package works smoothly, I'm not able to run "make html" for the
manual. Just in case you didn't follow the whole thread ...


André

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

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

[Graham W. <bo...@de...>]

On Sun, May 09, 2004 at 05:29:57PM -0400, Faheem Mitha wrote:
> One possibility is that you could separate the doc package into
> python-pyx-html-doc and python-pyx-pdf-doc, and then put
> python-pyx-html-doc in contrib.

My preference would be to look more into the latex2html situation to see
how long until it might be resolved, and also to see if there are any
other alternatives to latex2html that can be used.

> I don't think you would need to put it in non-free since it seems to
> me to satisfy the requirements of
> http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#s-contrib.

Yes, that is a good point.

> I wonder how the main python html docs are done. They seem to be in main.
> It looks like it is generated using latex2html.

Yes, it is probably a good thinkg to look into.

> Have you been able to build the html manual? I have tried and failed.

I tried a while back and didn't have any luck. I'll try again shortly.

-- 
gram

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

[Faheem M. <fa...@em...>]

On Sun, 9 May 2004, Graham Wilson wrote:

> On Sun, May 09, 2004 at 05:29:57PM -0400, Faheem Mitha wrote:
> > One possibility is that you could separate the doc package into
> > python-pyx-html-doc and python-pyx-pdf-doc, and then put
> > python-pyx-html-doc in contrib.
>
> My preference would be to look more into the latex2html situation to see
> how long until it might be resolved, and also to see if there are any
> other alternatives to latex2html that can be used.

tex4ht (the command htlatex for latex sources) works well in general (I
used it extensively a few years ago), but I don't know if the python tools
would cooperate with it.

                                                                Faheem.