Re: RFC doc/info/man should be delivered separately

On 03/08/13 15:50, Earnie Boyd wrote:
> Currently we deliver the three sets of documentation in the same -doc-
> file.

This isn't universally true -- there are three mingw32 packages, (bzip2,
lua, and zlib, all of which I contributed originally, IIRC), and one
MSYS package, (msys-perl), which deliver manpages in a separate "man"
component package, and other documentation in a "doc" component.

However, all documentation in a composite "doc" component package does
seem to be the norm.  Indeed, this distribution model is supported by
http://MinGW.org/PackageIdentificationHOWTO; (of course, this can be
changed, and I'm inclined to agree that this may be desirable).

> For the up and coming release I'm thinking we should split these into
> -doc-, -info- and -man-.

I can support this, in principle; however, it would require significant
repackaging throughout the entire corpus of MinGW and MSYS packages.
Who is going to undertake that effort?

> Doing this we can provide a post install instruction for -info- to
> rebuild the dir file

Ideally, this should be triggered by a post-install script, embedded
within the XML specification for each "info" component package.  In
turn, that would require that either:--

1) msys-texinfo, (or a MinGW alternative, which we don't provide at
   present), would need to be declared as a mandatory prerequisite of
   each "info" component package, to ensure that "install-info" is
   available when mingw-get runs the post-install script, or

2) mingw-get needs to incorporate its own info installer function, as
   a lua library extension; (last time I looked into the feasibility
   of doing this, I diverted it to my "too hard" pile, because I was
   unable to build "install-info" in isolation from the rest of GNU
   texinfo, and GNU texinfo would not readily build with MinGW, but
   given Eli Zaretskii's recent statement about this, on MinGW-Users,
   this may be worth a further visit).

> and for -man- we can require the man reader package be installed.

Installing manpages takes relatively less effort than info, but the
declaration of the dependency on man itself would effectively make
msys-base a mandatory prerequisite of all "man" component packages.

> Comments, insults, flames?

I'm generally in favour; just wanted to point out some of the potential
issues.

-- 
Regards,
Keith.

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