Re: Installation of PDF/PS/DVI and HTML files

[Chet Ramey]

On 12/4/15 4:24 AM, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Greg Wooledge <wooledg@eeg.ccf.org> skribis:
> 
>> On Thu, Dec 03, 2015 at 01:08:13PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>>> Given that the GCS suggests installing only the Info version of the
>>> manual by default (info "(standards) Standard Targets")
>>
>>> What do you think?
>>
>> I think that's a stupid suggestion.  The de facto standard for "make"
>> followed "make install" on a Unix-like system is to install man pages.
>> If there's an info page, I have no objection to installing that as well,
>> but to omit the standard man pages by default is ridiculous.
> 
> Agreed; apologies for being unclear.
> 
> As Mathieu wrote, I am of course fine installing man and Info manuals by
> default, like GNU packages generally do.
> 
> The suggestion I make is to not install PDF/PS/DVI and HTML files by
> default.  

Again, only the HTML files are installed by `make install'.  The sticking
point here appears to be installing the HTML files, which you can suppress
by running `make install' with htmldir set to the empty string.  Is that
what you're saying?

> This would comply with the GCS and user expectations, and also
> sidestep the bit-for-bit reproducibility issues that generating those
> PDF/PS/DVI/HTML files entails.

So the problem is once again the build and not the install?  Since the
build version appears in the version string, and that changes each time
the binary is rebuilt, bit-by-bit reproducibility is not going to be
generally possible.

However, if it's the build, if something changes when you run make, it
implies that one of the source files changed or that the target did not
exist.  bash-4.4, unlike bash-4.3, will ship with the generated
documentation (look at the bash-4.4-beta distribution, for example).
Given that, under what circumstances would the generated documentation
need to be rebuilt by this `reproducible builds' effort?

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/