Advise on Fedora RPM's

[Paul W. Frields]

On Sun, 2005-11-20 at 11:21 -0600, Tommy Reynolds wrote:
> Uttered Patrick Barnes <nman64 at n-man.com>, spake thus:
> 
> > +1 on the package type.  Location would be /usr/src/redhat.  The full
> > name might be something like 'fedora-doc-install-guide-devel.src.rpm'.
> 
> Dude!  Thanks for the magic word "-devel"!  I don't know why I didn't
> think of that from the first.  That was the missing piece, at least
> for now ;-)
> 
> I'm thinking of these RPM's:
> 
> <foo>-<version>.src.rpm			Raw CVS dump, w/o CVS subdirs
> <foo>-devel-<version>.noarch.rpm	Everything in CVS w/corrected paths
> <foo>-<lang>-<version>.noarch.rpm	XML, XSL, images and desktop files
> 
> The .src RPM is for archiving purposes, I guess.

Umm... Methinks this is kind of missing the point of the .src.rpm.  That
is the source for building; no -devel package containing more of the
same is needed, certainly not on a per-doc basis (see below).  The
original DocBook XML source is in the .src.rpm, probably duplicated
again in the normal .noarch.rpm because yelp uses DocBook XML directly.
Why triplicate this?

The only thing that should be needed for building is
"fedora-doc-common-<ver>.noarch.rpm" (or just call it
"fedora-doc-devel-<ver>.noarch.rpm"), which would contain user scripts
and helpers equivalent to what's in CVS (probably just relocating, as
mentioned above).  Doesn't matter whether its "-common" or "-devel," as
long as it fulfills certain criteria:

- Puts common entities, images, stylesheets and so forth in a place
where they are available not just for the user building docs, but also
where they can be accessed for use in yelp, khelpcenter, etc.
- Includes scripts that allow documents to be built from XML source
already written to /usr/share/fedora/doc/ (or wherever is referenced
in /usr/share/omf/<docname>/<locale> as part of
fedora-doc-<lang>-<ver>.noarch.rpm
- Proper Requires: on any stuff we're currently using (e.g. xmlformat)
that needs to also be in Extras or Core

If we need to change scripts, Makefiles, and such to make them
universally adaptable not just in CVS but in their packaged form, let's
do that.  Better that than having to maintain two sets of scripts and
build environments.  Is there a good reason *not* to do so (you know,
other than "gee, that sounds hard")?

> The -devel RPM is for folk wishing to use the FDP infrastructure but
> not using the CVS facilities.  I'm not sure where the -devel files
> should go, but maybe a "pkg-config" crutch would fix this.

There's really no reason they couldn't live in /usr/share/fedora/
somwhere, which is the right place for them given the namespacing the
rest of the Fedora Project is using.

> The <lang> RPM would hold the XML infrastructure to allow desktop
> tools like yelp to work.

Right, which is why a separate -devel per doc is probably not that
useful.  With a proper extra doc on "How to Build Docs," itself included
in yelp/khelpcenter as part of the fedora-doc-[common|devel] package,
people should be able to "fedoradoc-make" a doc, or something like that,
to build things we've included, or their own docs.  Perhaps such a
helper would also include relevant checks for project standards.

> Hmm... I'll think about this a bit more.
> 
> Thanks!

I realized that having a <lang> RPM implies we should have separate
<lang> .desktop files for each package.  Just a note for the archive for
later...

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE                          http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
 Fedora Documentation Project: http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/docs/
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