gEDA-dev: Re: [Gnucap-devel] Gnucap docs build failure on FC5 (and other places)

[Stuart Brorson]

> Hello gEDA-dev,
> I have been using your work for a while and am presently trying to
> find my way around the source. While I do like your work I feel that
> if the documentation can be in 100k and not 1M it should be. I don't
> care for Adobe Acrobat. It runs ok on my Athlon but one my older PII
> laptop it is slow as heck. While I am going to dump the laptop I can
> empathize with anyone on limited hardware. All those 1M files add up.
> I have several DVDs I have burned over the years full of nothing but
> PDFs. Anything that can be opened in vi works for me but I don't like
> ASCII art ether. There should be ether more options of users or a
> single option in between the two extremes.

*sigh*

Do you ever use Latex on your underpowered boxes?  If so, how do you
render the resulting images on your screen to view the result?  A dvi
viewer?  If you don't use or look at the Latex stuff, my point is not
germane to your situation.

I'll try to refine my point this way:  For Al's Gnucap manual the build
chain in question is this:

Latex -> dvi -> pdf

Many users don't have Latex installed.  In certain situations, this
causes Gnucap's configure to die, and you can't build Gnucap before
installing Latex.  Not very useful.  Indeed, it's kind of crazy that a
build can be prevented beause some doc files can't be generated.

My suggestion is to fix this problem by distributing the Latex *and*
the .pdf with the Gnucap distro.  This solves the problem of missing
Latex.  Then you can read whichever you want with whatever tools you
have.  If your machines are too wimpy to use pdf, well, look at the
Latex source.  Or maybe it's time to get a machine where you don't
have to worry about saving 1MB.  Or just delete the stupid .pdf file!
(*sheesh*)

While we're at it, I think the other documentation format for
distribution should be .html.  This is a nice ASCII format, can be
browsed

The point behind this is that we too often distribute only texinfo or
something like that.  Then we build this way:

tex -> html.

(or something like that).  Again, if the tool used to generate html
(latex2html) is missing (or if you don't have Perl since it is a Perl
script), you can't get readable docs.  And a badly prepared configure
script will simply die when the appropriate tool isn't available.
I've seen this situation on another box I recently build.

Generalizing, the problem is *dependencies*.  For end users, one of
gEDA's bigger problems is the number of dependences.  Distros are all
over the map in terms of what is bundled, what is not, what is
installed by default and what is not.  Many of the complaints we hear
from clueless newbies have to do with not being able to install
(either from CD, source, or whatever) since there are so many
dependecies.

By making the build of any of the gEDA Suite packages
dependent not only upon various software libraries (for teh programs
themselves), but also upon the presence of documentation build tools,
the dependency problem is exacerbated.  My suggestion is that we
distribute the documentation targets for all gEDA programs -- not just
the Latex sources -- so that this dependency problem is removed.

> Anything that can be opened in vi works for me . . .

It sounds like you would never be able to use Al's manual anyway.

Stuart