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

[Stuart Brorson]

> 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.

I'll expand on this point just a little more.

In distributing sofware, it makes sense to distribute the program
itself as source code, since the target (binary object files) is very
machine dependent.  That is, a binary compiled for x86 won't run on
SPARC, but -- in principle -- both machines can use the same source
code.  That is, we let the machine itself figure out how to binaries
since the binaries depend very sensitively upon machine architecture. 
In this case, we accept and deal with the dependency problem
since the hassles of dealing with object binaries is large.

In the case of distributing documentation, however, it makes sense to
distribute the targets (along with the source, if desired) since .pdf,
dvi, html, etc is the same on my x86, my OSX, my SPARC, and my Windoze
box.   Therefore, it's wiser from a distribution standpoint to
eliminate the dependency problem and just distribute the targets.
This eliminates a good chunk of the build problems we see in the
field.

As for the person who made the point that the problem was an autoconf
issue:  If you would care to actually do some work and send a patch to
fix the configure.ac file instead of proferring cheap advice, then I'd
stand up and take notice.   Otherwise, you're just blowing easy
advice out your @ss.  Tweaking the autotools so that they do the right
thing in every case is a difficult job.  You'd know that if you tried
to do some real implementation.

Stuart