Test RPM

[John J. McDonough]

On Tue, 2010-01-12 at 16:10 -0500, Paul W. Frields wrote:

> So the .spec file you're using is sort of a strawman, and when it
> works fully that's what people will write some code to produce?
> 

Actually, the RPM was produced by by a program, I just didn't publish
the latest version with your changes yet. Saturday's version is at
http://github.com/jjmcd/FedoraDox/tree/master/tools/doc-publican-rpm/
(RPM in the downloads section).

Publican will package a document for us, but it will only package a
language at a time.  Each language results in its own menu entry.  For a
document that gets a lot of translations that is obviously a little
unweildy.

Packaging a Publican document isn't rocket science, tho.  So, I wrote a
program which takes whatever htmls you have built for a Publican
document, provides an index.html that selects the language (thanks Jeff
Fearne), generates the tar for the RPM, the spec and two desktop files,
one for Gnome/XFCE and another for KDE, and runs rpmbuild.  So
basically, the packager just does a Publican build for the desired
languages and then runs this program and out pops an RPM and SRPM.

A few months back I went around with Jeff Fearne on having Publican do
this, and he wasn't very receptive.  Now that we have the logic worked
out and with Publican 1.0 it is a little easier to see how it would
work, perhaps he will reconsider.  But for now, I have a program which
will package a multilanguage Publican document, which is what we are
trying to get polished.

I wrote the thing in C, but it should be a script.  I'm just not enough
of a bash guru  to do some of the fancy dancing required.  Just
packaging the release notes really stretched my bash skills,
generalizing it wasn't something I could see how to do.

We have also been talking about the possibility of using langpacks to
get the best of all worlds, but that requires some post-install
hocus-pocus that I haven't sorted out how to do for html, although for
Yelp it looks pretty simple.

Last week at our meeting we decided that for F13 we would use html since
the yelp document isn't available to KDE users, but html works for
everyone.  If Shaun can come up with some common format/app for
Gnome/KDE/XFCE we would be in hog heaven, but we're not expecting to see
that in time for F13.

So we are pursuing multiple avenues to try to come up with a delivery
system that is easy to use but provides more flexibility than what we
have now.

--McD